Re: [Caml-list] CTAN/CPAN for Caml (COCAN ...?)

["Wolfgang Müller" <Wolfgang.Mueller2@uni-bayreuth.de>]

On Wednesday 16 July 2003 08:43, BdB wrote:
> €.02 here: there's a couple of stuff that a CPAN-like website could do
My $0.02 (for character table reasons ;-) )
>   1) hosting libs
>   2) cross-referencing & automatic dependency generation
>   3) registry (the business of ensuring non-collision)
>
> It seems to me that the sites you mention only provide hosting among these
> three points. Which is still interesting.

I agree completely here. I think it would be great to have some automatic 
installation or downloading facility like the CPAN module in perl. I think 
like this it would be easier to make people like me (i.e. newbies) look for 
useful stuff before starting to code, and make it easy for people to ship 
their code if it needs to be shipped. 

Personally, in my experience with CPAN IMHO what is needed most for shipping 
code is some code that generates a tarball of all the prerequisites needed 
for a given package of code, together with an idiot-proof makefile. Most 
people I work with do not like the -MCPAN (it can make problems if you're not 
root, you have to answer many questions, there are firewalls), so I cannot 
send them simple scripts that use the CPAN module for downloading the useful 
stuff, I have to do the actual tarballs myself.

> I would think that coding 2) is just a matter of motivation. ocamldep and
> camlp4 should help.

Oh, for this I am too newbyish

> As for the last point... well, one possible drawback of current O'CaML is
> its module namespace. My fear is that module names are soon enough going to
> look like JoesXMLParser to distinguish it from MikesXMLParser (betting on
> the success of the initiative here). Well, actually there can be modules
> within modules, so that's not exactly a flat module namespace. But if
> someone makes a module called Joe.XMLParser, it has got to be defined in
> joe.ml[i], which is in my opinion a pretty bad name to give to a file
> containing an XML parser. Maybe java-like module namespace partition is
> something worth considering for efficient community management?

...sounds great to a newbie like me...

Cheers,
Wolfgang

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