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 pBGEC2q9006839 for ; Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:12:02 +0100 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: ApYBAC5R607B/BfVlGdsb2JhbABEhQyjfYJsAQEBAQkLCQkUAyKBcgEBBAEjFUEFCwsOCgICBSECAg8COAENBg0BBwEBEAeHXwKnB5FmgS+JP4EWBJR2hU6MXw X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.71,363,1320620400"; d="scan'208";a="123660440" Received: from msa04.smtpout.orange.fr (HELO msa.smtpout.orange.fr) ([193.252.23.213]) by mail4-smtp-sop.national.inria.fr with ESMTP; 16 Dec 2011 15:11:57 +0100 Received: from [192.168.1.105] ([83.199.22.116]) by mwinf5d68 with ME id 9qBv1i0032WGtrF03qBvNv; Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:11:56 +0100 Message-ID: <4EEB51AB.10200@frisch.fr> Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:11:55 +0100 From: Alain Frisch User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686 on x86_64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20111105 Thunderbird/8.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Gerd Stolpmann CC: Aleksey Nogin , caml-list@inria.fr References: <4EDE33A0.6070004@gmail.com> <1323760512.9833.9.camel@samsung> <4EE711FB.5020602@frisch.fr> <4EE83C26.7090108@frisch.fr> <1323867161.7750.27.camel@samsung> <4EE8DC93.1000806@metaprl.org> <1323884194.7750.58.camel@samsung> <4EEB3BF7.30401@frisch.fr> <1324041254.7750.99.camel@samsung> In-Reply-To: <1324041254.7750.99.camel@samsung> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Some comments on recent discussions On 12/16/2011 02:14 PM, Gerd Stolpmann wrote: > Simple answer: There is a bootstrap problem: The existing Ocaml users > are almost Unix-only. They do not care about Windows. In order to > establish "Windows-typical problem solving" you need definitely more > Windows users, but they will only come if you have a Windows-typical way > of distribution. > > My thinking is that you can break this circle only if you go forward and > try to make as many Unix-style solutions available under Windows as > possible. Honestly, I think this is the wrong approach. The Windows-style of packaging (i.e. lack of packaging system) is very simple to implement: just ship zip files or Windows installers. It's less comfortable than powerful package systems as we're used to in the Unix world, but it is not an issue for Windows users. > By the way, your plan includes Unix emulation, too, under point 3. It's > only more hidden. Yes, but Unix emulation exists and works not too badly. You can use Cygwin, or msys, etc. I can see two reasons for reimplementing Unix-like tools, and none of them are good: - We want to control everything in order to have better options for creating nice packages for OCaml related stuff. This is a bad reason, because Windows users except binary package anyway, so the external tools needed during the build process don't have to be redistributed. The only external tools which are currently mandatory to use ocaml are an assembler and a linker, and some native libraries. Not a Unix shell, a "find" or a "ls" command. - Existing solutions are not build on strong technical foundations, and one thinks one can do better. Ok, but this has nothing to do with OCaml; this will necessarily represent a huge amount of work; and I don't see why people who don't really care about Windows would do a better job in a few months than people who've spent years of work on cygwin/msys/etc. Can you explain what's wrong with my approach: * OCaml users have access to binary packages which can be trivially installed (zip files or installers) and are self-contained. * People in charge of creating these packages use existing Unix-like environment (cygwin/msys/...); and progressively, they publish "best practices" for the whole community in order to simplify their job (e.g. try to rely on ocamlbuild or omake instead of Makefiles; avoid relying on symbolic links; etc). Alain