Re: [Caml-list] Ocamlcore.org: Discussions place, and requirements

[Romain Beauxis <toots@rastageeks.org>]

Le Friday 01 February 2008 14:27:23 Pietro Abate, vous avez écrit :
> On Fri, Feb 01, 2008 at 01:36:09PM +0100, Romain Beauxis wrote:
> > Second questions is ocaml modules that we are going to distribute there.
> > While we have discussed that different way we could use to collect
> > projects from different places, I don't think we discussed the minimal
> > support that the module should provide when it comes to installing and
> > registering the module.
>
> I think that for the moment it's useless to strive to convert every and
> each ocaml developer to use the same build system. As I suggested
> before, what we should do is only to agree to an interface and then let
> the various distribution to deal with build dependencies. In your
> example, if a library don't use ocamlfind, this is ok. The only
> important thing is to honor the build interface.
>
> As a developer (and as a software maintainer) I imagine a world where if
> I want to use library x.y I've only to take care to give it the right
> tools to build, but with the assurance that if I call 'make install',
> the library will end up in the right place. Ocamlcore.org would contain
> all these libraries so fetching a new version from the net and
> re-compiling it would be a snap.
>
> One day we could hope for a convergence in the building tool department
> as well, but I think is far too early to call for this kind of
> standardization. For example it would be great if all developers would
> integrate the debian patches to their build systems...

I'm completly agnostic on the tool used and I agree that it should be more an 
issue of a common interface.

The other needs I was expressing where:
 * Standard location for installation
 * Standard way to check if a system can provide build environment for a given 
module, for compilation checks and build in projects using the module.


Romain