RE: [Caml-list] Compiling Cryptokit on Windows

[David Allsopp <dra-news@metastack.com>]

Romain Bardou wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> 
> There has been some discussion during the last few months were some
> argued that there was not enough Windows users to test libraries. Well it
> happens that I need to compile Cryptokit for Windows. Here are my first
> results, which failed miserably. I'm using OCaml 3.12.
> 
> 
> 1) With Cryptokit 1.5.
> 
> INSTALL.txt states that I need findlib. I installed OCaml from:
> 	http://protz.github.com/ocaml-installer/
> And it seems that ocamlfind is not installed by this tool. After more
> search I read here:
> 	http://www.camlcity.org/archive/programming/findlib.html
> that "Volunteers are still wanted who port findlib to Windows and
> Macintosh."

findlib is perfectly ported, and has been for years (see Gerd's email) - you simply need to compile it.

All that's required is a recent Cygwin with the make, mingw64-i686-gcc-core and m4 packages (patch is a good idea as well).

Assuming a working OCaml environment (OCAMLLIB set with a correct *Windows* PATH etc). For findlib 1.2.7, you need to patch the configure script - find the line camlp4_dir=`camlp4 -where` and change it camlp4_dir=`camlp4 -where | tr -d '\015'` or you'll get a corrupt META file for camlp4.

It's built using ./configure && make all opt install

To compile Cryptokit with ZLIB support requires a patch (happy to send it - it's because of a limitation in OASIS - at least at the time I built it) but otherwise:

ocaml setup.ml -configure
ocaml setup.ml -build
ocaml setup.ml -install

While it's far from ideal, life is *much* easier on Windows with a compiler (i.e. building from sources). It's also a really good idea *not* to use spaces in anything (I use C:\Dev - although amusing that's had an issue with a buggy flexlink trying to write /dev/null!). Write your own software to handle spaces correctly, but don't expect Unix-only guys to think that way ;o)

With my last refresh of OCaml to 3.12.2, I produced fully automated scripts for Windows compilation - at some point, I'll try to chuck them up somewhere in case they're of use to others (but the recent work with GODI on Windows is much more promising than what I was doing...). If you're feeling brave, I'm happy to send the scripts and patches off-list (OCaml with findlib, extlib, calendar, pcre, csv, pgocaml, zlib, camlzip, openssl, cryptokit, ocamlnet, json-wheel/static, spidermonkey+spidercaml, ocamlsha and ocamldap)


David