[Caml-list] Re: oasis & macosx

[Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain@le-gall.net>]

Hello all,

Sorry for the very late reply on this thread. 

In gmane.comp.lang.caml.inria, you wrote:
>> - the documentation can be confusing, because I have written it and I
>>  probably know the system too much, ideally someone with no prior
>>  knowledge should review it to make it understandable by an oasis
>>  beginner (help are welcome on this point)
>
> I don't think that's a good idea. You built that system, you are the
> one who knows it best and if you don't know how to explain it to
> others we have a problem.
>

Unfortunately teaching (as in "being able to make other people
understand") and coding are two different things. I won't say that
I am a good teacher. I tend to go too fast in details, which is not a
good thing. The documentation already written reflect my style. As
you can see, I am far from being a perfect teacher ;-)

I will be glad to accept help from people that know how to teach,
hopefully this will even contribute to improve my own style.

> Unless I'm mistaken, at the moment there's no documentation about
> oasis-db. There's this page :
>
> http://oasis.forge.ocamlcore.org/oasis-db.html

Well, there is a preliminary work document here:
https://forge.ocamlcore.org/docman/view.php/54/123/Technical+specification.pdf

It gives detail on the infrastructure. But it is evolving as I code
oasis-db. Once the system will reach a stable status, I will publish a
more in-depth description of it.

>
> From the user perspective the experience I personally would like is :
>
> 1) Find a way to install the ocaml compilers
> 2) Download the oasis sources, compile them (don't ask me to install
> other things).
> 3) You can now oasis install/uninstall the packages that are uploaded
> in oasis-db

The point 2) will be solved by providing an oasis-bundle-XXX.tar.gz that
will contain oasis and its dependencies to be compiled in an easy way.

But to create the bundle, I use oasis-db... (see the bundle section in
the technical specification). I am working on this "bundle" subcommand
since yesterday.

>
> From the publisher perspective the experience looks right to me,
> provide an _oasis file in your tarball, upload it on oasis-db. That's
> it, your package is now installable with oasis.
>

At least, there is a good point ;-)

> > - there should be a binary installer for easy install on MacOS X, but
>>  until recently I don't have a Mac at hand to do it. This is now fixed
>>  but I don't manage to have the time to learn how to make a package on
>>  MacOS X
>
> I don't think time should be lost on providing binary installers for
> various platforms, this doesn't scale. Time should be spent on trying
> to make oasis able to bootstrap itself based on the existence of an
> ocaml install. This scales and makes oasis easy to install on every
> platform where it will be needed.
>

Creating binary installers is not a big deal once you know how to do
them. I am still a strong believer in binary distribution (i.e. Debian,
Fedora or binary installers). It tends to ease the adoption of a
program, especially by beginners who won't spend 30 minutes compiling
something.

For small programs and libraries, it should be easy to use source code
distribution. But people should be allowed to have binary counterpart
for some packages, especially for executables only (i.e. oasis, unison,
mldonkey). This kind of executables target people that are most of the
time 100% beginners in OCaml.

Cheers,
Sylvain Le Gall
-- 
My company: http://www.ocamlcore.com
Linkedin:   http://fr.linkedin.com/in/sylvainlegall
Start an OCaml project here: http://forge.ocamlcore.org
OCaml blogs:                 http://planet.ocamlcore.org