Re: [Caml-list] Re: ~/.opam design

["Sébastien Dailly" <sebastien-ocaml@chimrod.com>]

Le 2013-05-30 09:38, Thomas Gazagnaire a écrit :

>
> The subject is not closed at all, and we might move in this direction
> in future releases of OPAM. See for instance [1]

Thanks for pointing the issue. I answerd on the mailing list without 
consulting the project site.

>
> The current design has a lot of advantages (the main one being that
> you can remove your ~/.opam if you want restart from scratch) and it
> can be tweaked to have a global installation (see [2,3], even if the
> tweak is not very well documented).

Each application has a good reason for beiing installed directly in the 
~ directory. But in a deskop usage (server is different), this finaly 
create a big polution in the user directory. The xdg try to define a 
general usage for preventing this.

> But yes, for some configurations
> (such as shared NFS homedirs), the current situation is not perfect
> and it would be nice to be able to separate the data from the
> configuration bits.

This is a more general problem : exporting the configuration from one 
site to another one, or versionning the opam conf in a production server 
is greatly facilitated if the configuration is located in a dedicated 
path.

> Luckily, all the paths used by OPAM are defined in
> [4] so they can be changed without too much hassle.

The main advantage I can see with the xdg path is that the 
configuration path is declared before installing anything, and can be 
configured once for a whole system. This allow to configure differents 
workspace just by sourcing a bash file ; as I can do with findlib and 
${OCAMLFIND_CONF}

I think you can get as many pros as cons, but today, the xdg path is a 
standard in a desktop…

Regards,

-- 
Sébastien