OPAM binary packages (was Re: Problems to get larger user base ... (Re: [Caml-list] OCaml's variables))

[Thomas Gazagnaire <thomas@ocamlpro.com>]

This thread is diverging quite a lot :-)

>> By the way, is there some plan to support binary packages
>> at some point in time with OPAM?
>> 
>> I don't mean OCamlPro distributing them but for an OPAM
>> user to be able to create them locally.
>> 
>> That would speedup the process of installing software (given they
>> have at least been compiled once).
> 
> This.
> 
> [..]
> 
> It's a tall order, b/c OPAM will need to figure out how to capture
> enough of the environment (in order to check it on the target machine
> where a binary is installed) to verify whether it's safe to install
> that binary.  But boy would it be nice.

We are indeed in the process of experimenting with that idea (see [1]). Nothing is ready yet, but that's definitely something we are interested in.

The hard part is (as always) to keep track of the correct external dependencies (such as the available shared C libraries available at the time of build). A good first approximation is to say that the external dependencies never change, but that's obviously not very safe to rely on that assumption too much, so we are thinking of keeping track of the result given by ldd as well.

Best,
Thomas

[1] https://github.com/venator/opam/blob/binary/src/core/opamBinary.ml