Re: [Caml-list] Some comments on recent discussions

[Alain Frisch <alain@frisch.fr>]

On 12/14/2011 10:34 AM, Jonathan Protzenko wrote:
>> For the native compiler, we need an external toolchain, but this is
>> not a huge issue. With some little amount of work, one could support a
>> standalone msys/mingw (as opposed to mingw compilers packaged in Cygwin)
> This is precisely what http://protz.github.com/ocaml-installer/
> provides. Is that not what you're describing here?

Yes, I guess.  Is has been known for some time that the mingw port could 
be made to work with a standalone mingw compiler at little cost, but the 
"officially" supported mingw port required Cygwin, and flexdll needs to 
be adapted a little bit.  Providing long-term support for this new setup 
will take some resource (yet another Windows port!).

Alternatively, one could decide that the officially supported "mingw 
port" is based on a standalone mingw (or mingw-w64); Cygwin packagers 
could always create OCaml packages for the mingw compilers shipped with 
Cygwin.

This is a big move, which will probably make some people unhappy.

>> and it would be interesting to come up with a minimal mingw
>> distribution (only with a C compiler, assembler, etc, as required by
>> ocamlopt) that could be packaged together with OCaml.
> Looks a little bit more involved but not un-feasible. Would you be
> interested in helping me maintain such a port? ;-)

Yes, I can help solving some specific problems (e.g. with flexdll); but 
probably not for long-term maintenance.

-- Alain