From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr (mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.105]) by walapai.inria.fr (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id pBGA3hMu030396 for ; Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:03:43 +0100 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AmkBAGwW606K54gDi2dsb2JhbABDFoR2pkYiAQEBCgsLGyWBcgEBBSMPAUUBEAsODAIFFgsCAgkDAgECAUUGDQEHAhCHbqcRkWGBL4k/gRYElHaFToxf X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.71,362,1320620400"; d="scan'208";a="123620981" Received: from rouge.crans.org ([138.231.136.3]) by mail4-smtp-sop.national.inria.fr with ESMTP/TLS/ADH-AES256-SHA; 16 Dec 2011 11:03:38 +0100 Received: from localhost (localhost.crans.org [127.0.0.1]) by rouge.crans.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AF36580E4; Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:03:37 +0100 (CET) X-Virus-Scanned: Debian amavisd-new at crans.org Received: from rouge.crans.org ([10.231.136.3]) by localhost (rouge.crans.org [10.231.136.3]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with LMTP id 8a-5XWkU-1Ye; Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:03:37 +0100 (CET) Received: from [152.81.3.42] (wencory.loria.fr [152.81.3.42]) (using TLSv1 with cipher AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by rouge.crans.org (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 54FF48077; Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:03:37 +0100 (CET) Message-ID: <4EEB1778.3000600@glondu.net> Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:03:36 +0100 From: =?UTF-8?B?U3TDqXBoYW5lIEdsb25kdQ==?= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.24) Gecko/20111114 Icedove/3.1.16 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Gerd Stolpmann CC: caml-list@inria.fr References: <55531934-37A5-4CC5-AB67-20CE4CCE8269@googlemail.com> <4EE37070.4010702@inria.fr> <1323601377.6079.40.camel@samsung> <20111213193656.GB5387@siouxsie> <1323864795.7750.11.camel@samsung> In-Reply-To: <1323864795.7750.11.camel@samsung> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Subject: Re: [Caml-list] OCaml maintenance status / community fork (again) Le 14/12/2011 13:13, Gerd Stolpmann a écrit : > Not yet, but this is certainly not impossible with a to-be-written > package converter. > > So far, there has been nobody who investigated this in detail. > (Actually, I'm a bit surprised that none of the OS packagers had the > idea yet - this could save a lot of time for them.) There is alien [1]. However, I don't really see the point when you already have access to quality native packages, and I usually prefer to run directly upstream's "./configure && make && make install" for stuff that are not already packaged (and, sometimes, I package it myself :). For system-wide installation, I usually use checkinstall [2] to register it to my package manager. Alien and checkinstall cannot be used to make redistributable packages, though, and they are quite Linux-centric. [1] http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/alien/ [2] http://checkinstall.izto.org/ My humble opinion about all these packaging issues is that the OCaml community is just too small (and/or lacks dedicated people) to create and maintain a quality package set that can be advertised to attract more people. Moreover, most OCaml stuff are for the OCaml community, which is quite a restricted audience. In my experience (in Debian), the "written in OCaml" argument works only for people who know and program in OCaml already, and tends to make others flee. On the other way, there are many applications written in e.g. Python that are popular, and you know that they are written in Python only by looking at the source code. Maybe people should write more end-user applications in OCaml (but neither scientific nor OCaml-centric) to promote OCaml better. Like unison, ledit, mldonkey, etc. And be reactive to external contributions (be it bugreports, feature wishes or patches), so that people get progressively contaminated by the OCaml virus :-) Cheers, -- Stéphane