[Caml-list] New iteration of the Windows installer

[Caml-list] New iteration of the Windows installer

[Jonathan Protzenko]

Dear OCaml programmers using Windows,

I'm happy to announce a new iteration of the Windows installer that I'm 
currently maintaining. The installer installs /native/, 32-bit OCaml 
compilers, that produce /native/, 32-bit windows programs. The OCaml 
native compiler ("ocamlopt") and tools (flexlink) requires a proper 
toolchain to be installed, namely the 32-bit one from the mingw64 
project. This toolchain is impeccably packaged in Cygwin, so the 
installer will advertise the use of cygwin as a development 
environment. Some other tools require the presence of Unix-like 
utilities; OCamlbuild, for instance, requires bash to be available. 
This is also achieved by using Cygwin as a development environment. The 
installer also installs findlib.

The installer does _not_ install any other OCaml library. This is the 
job of a package manager; unfortunately, there is still a long way to 
go on Windows. If I can tweak anything in the installer that would ease 
the life of a package manager, please let me know.

This release fixes several bugs that have been mentioned on this list.
- The Cygwin mirror is no longer hardcoded. The original idea was to 
save the user one more setup screen, where they have to choose which 
Cygwin mirror they use; mirrors, however, seem to come and go pretty 
fast, which probably explains why people witnessed packages which were 
not installed properly.
- The URL to the ActiveTCL installer has been updated.
- Flexdll has been updated to v0.31
- findlib.cmxa is now also packaged.

The installer is available at 
http://yquem.inria.fr/~protzenk/caml-installer/ocaml-4.00.1-i686-mingw64-installer2.exe

Please give it a try and let me know how things work. If everything 
goes fine, I'll make this the default installer advertised on 
http://protz.github.io/ocaml-installer/.

Cheers,

~ jonathan