Re: [Caml-list] [ANNOUNCE] Development versions: ocamlconf, ASPCC

[Kenneth Knowles <kknowles@uclink.berkeley.edu>]

Sorry if I wasn't clear about this:

> I guess you mean David's Advanced Revision Control System. 

DARCS is very nice; if you are familiar with Tom Lord's arch, consider a similar
design, but many fewer commands and simpler usage - this may or may not be ideal
for you.  I also gain a lot of confidence from DARCS being written in Haskell.

> There is no Debian package for this,
> though it looks like a useful program.  

>From the DARCS webpage:
----------------------

Debian users

If you use debian, you can install darcs via apt. For woody, add the following
lines to your sources.list: 

deb http://http.abridgegame.org/debian/ woody/
deb-src http://http.abridgegame.org/debian/ woody/ 

If you are running woody, and want to compile darcs yourself, you may want to
add the following line as well, which provides a ghc compiler that is
sufficiently recent to compile darcs: 

deb http://www.syntaxpolice.org/haskell-experimental/ stable/

If you are running sid (Debian unstable), you can instead use the following
lines: 

deb http://http.abridgegame.org/debian/ unstable/
deb-src http://http.abridgegame.org/debian/ unstable/ 
 
> I wonder if Darcs could be modified to explicitly keep track of changes
> to the ASTs of OCaml source files...

Now this sounds interesting!  Someone very ambitious could invent a source
control item with plugins for parsing different languages, and diffing the
trees.
 
> Could it output an OCaml script instead of a makefile?  It would
> probably be easier to read, debug, and modify.

I phrased this badly.  What you want, is what it does, I think.  I should have
said that it "outputs a configure script, which when run outputs a makefile and
config.ml"

I will quickly explain all of what it does.

(1)	You write configure.ml, somewhat analogous to configure.ac
(2)	You run ocamlconf, it creates a configure script
----
(3) The end user/you run the configure script - it outputs a makefile and/or
    configuration summary ocaml file.
(4) make && make install

Every stage is easy to debug - your configure.ml script is a simple ocaml
script.  The configure script (actually configure.mlc, for technical reasons,
and the configure script is a shell wrapper around `ocaml configure.mlc`) is
also plain text ocaml, but with additional code copied into it.  And even the
makefile is about as simple as possible for your project, so hopefully bugs in
ocamlconf will easily be discovered.

Kenn

-------------------
To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr
Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/
Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners