[Caml-list] odb.ml mailing list

[Edgar Friendly <thelema314@gmail.com>]

Francois Berenger has been kind enough to set up a google group for 
users of odb.ml[1], a simple package installer for OCaml.  If you're 
using odb or would like some help with it, you can subscribe to the 
group at:
http://groups.google.com/group/odb-users

If you don't know what odb is, it could be compared to GODI, but is much 
simpler.  It doesn't bootstrap itself, and assumes OCaml and findlib are 
already installed.  It has no configuration and requires no 
installation, just download and run a single .ml file.  It integrates 
with an existing ocaml install and works nicely with non-root 
installations of OCaml.  It gets package metadata (where packages are 
located, dependencies, etc.) from oasis-db[2], from a local or remote 
package file [3] or, in the simplest case, by being given the URL (or 
path) to a tarball on the command line.  Package files can also be used 
as the instructions for what to install, for example, Jane Street Core 
library 108.00 (and all its dependencies) can be installed using the 
single command[4]:

ocaml odb.ml --package 
https://raw.github.com/thelema/odb/master/core.package

If you'd like your software to be installable with Odb, the easiest way 
is to use oasis to generate your build system and upload your package to 
oasis-db.  For legacy packages, OMake and autoconf/make are also 
supported under some assumptions[5] that usually hold.

If you have any questions or comments, the best place for them is now 
the google group, although you can find me as thelema on 
#ocaml@irc.freenode.net most of the time.

E.

[1] https://github.com/thelema/odb
[2] http://oasis.ocamlcore.org/dev/odb/ (ignore the scary alpha warnings 
on the site)
[3] https://github.com/thelema/odb/blob/master/packages
[4] Ok, not really, you have to either use --sudo or --have-perms to 
install in the system-wide findlib site-lib, or do one of the following 
two commands so that OCaml can find the c stubs:

1) echo $HOME/.odb/lib/stublibs | sudo tee -a `ocamlc -where`/ld.conf
2) export CAML_LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/.odb/lib/stublibs

[5] https://github.com/thelema/odb/blob/master/guidelines.md