[Caml-list] ocamlbuild on cygwin

[Gergely Szilvasy <szilvasy@gmail.com>]

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Hello,

First of all, as this is my first post ever on this list, to all of you who
contribute to ocaml and its "ecosystem": a big thank you (ou encore mieux:
merci beaucoup)! It's brilliant stuff.

I'm trying to get as much of the ocaml/opam stack working on cygwin as
possible (as if there wasn't enough pain and suffering in the world
already).

Opam compiles without any issues, and I can switch to (let's say) 4.02.1
cleanly.

However, ocamlbuild fails for me in "opam install react" with the following
error:

"Failure: ocamlfind not found on path, but -no-ocamlfind not used."

(Note that react is required by utop, for example, so it's a pretty basic
requirement.)

This is where the exception is thrown:

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/ocamlbuild/options.ml#L295

It is the result of Command.search_in_path not finding ocamlfind:

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/ocamlbuild/command.ml#L130

Which appears to be caused by file_or_exe_exists not appending ".exe" to
the filename when Sys.os_type = "Cygwin" (which is what I see as os_type
when compiling on cygwin):

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/ocamlbuild/command.ml#L128

I'm not expert on either ocaml or cygwin, so my analysis may be off.

--

In any case, I'm pretty sure this fairly simple bug is not a (very) recent
regression, so I'm wondering if anybody cares about opam/ocaml on cygwin?
I'd really like to use opam, because it looks to me this is the community's
preferred way of distributing bits. My question is, really, what is the
status of ocaml/opam on cygwin? Is there an alternative environment for
Windows + opam that works better? (I know about wodi, but I'd prefer opam.)
Is it worth spending time fixing these issues on cygwin?

Any thoughts?

Regards,
Gergely

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