Re: ocamlbuild documentation (was Re: [Caml-list] Re: [ANN] OCaml Batteries Included, alpha 3)

["Daniel Bünzli" <daniel.buenzli@erratique.ch>]

Le 9 févr. 09 à 15:04, Romain Bardou a écrit :

>  However, there ARE some examples in the part which talks about  
> "flag", where we clearly see an usage (After_rules).

Which doesn't mean it cannot be used differently.

Anyway it seems useless arguing further: we just don't have the same  
standards.

The only thing I see is that there are still a lot of mentions to  
makefiles on this list and a lot of new projects don't use ocamlbuild  
while ocamlbuild is clearly a superior alternative. The only way I can  
explain this is by lack of good documentation. If you get the standard  
distribution you don't get documentation for ocamlbuild (except a  
brief manpage), there's no chapter on ocambuild in the manual, caml's  
site documentation page doesn't even have a link to the small manual  
or the wiki (you'll have to google to find it), the plugin api  
documentation is not installed etc. etc.

It's a pitty, given its caml only implementation, ocamlbuild could  
become a key part of a solid cross platform infrastructure for ocaml.  
Alas it doesn't seem to be used much (and the reason is IMHO the sad  
state of its documentation/advertising).

Best,

Daniel