nonresolved .cma files and errors

[Jeff Henrikson <jehenrik@yahoo.com>]

Hello caml-list,

I recently had a shocking realization about why some of my experiments 
with camlp4 weren't compiling.  I had been linking camlp4.cma, which was 
the old name of the library.  Now camlp4.cma doesn't exist and there are 
multiple flavors Camlp4xxx.cma where the xxx is the same flavor notation 
of the the preprocessor binaries.  So the trouble is, why was linking 
such a library not a fatal?  Apparently all missing .cma and .cmo files 
passed on the command line are considered non-errors.  It seems intutive 
to me that both should be fatals!

~/src/camlp4-beta jehenrik$ ocamlc -I +camlp4 -pp camlp4orf junk.cma 
camlp4orf.cma -c dynamic_functor_example3.ml
~/src/camlp4-beta jehenrik$ ocamlc -I +camlp4 -pp camlp4orf junk.cmo 
camlp4orf.cma -c dynamic_functor_example3.ml
~/src/camlp4-beta jehenrik$ ocamlc -I +camlp4 -pp camlp4orf junk.ml 
camlp4orf.cma -c dynamic_functor_example3.ml
I/O error: "junk.ml: No such file or directory"
Preprocessor error

This is the behavior in 3.09.3 as well.  What is the rationale behind 
this design choice?

Regards,


Jeff Henrikson