Re: [Caml-list] Build-/Installation-Tools - not enough of them?

[Francois Berenger <mlists@ligand.eu>]

On 27/11/2018 22:18, Malcolm Matalka wrote:
> Kakadu <kakadu.hafanana@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>>> I fully second Julia.
>>> In order to teach OCaml, I need simple and clear instructions
>>> for students.
>>> The current situation is
>>>   Search engine ->
>>>    https://ocaml.org/docs/install.html ->
>>>     https://opam.ocaml.org/doc/Install.html ->
>>>      nightmare.
>>> 
>> 
>> +1. Installing Opam 2.0 on Ubuntu is even more complicated (The only
>> trick I know is adding avsm's PPA which is not easy to google)
>> 
>> Happy hacking,
>> Kakadu
> 
> I know at one point there was talk of opam2{rpm,pkg,deb} style tools.
> Does anyone know the status of those?  I, personally, would benefit 
> from
> an opam2freebsdports.  ocaml-bundle came up earlier in the thread but 
> as
> I said it feels stapled onto opam and doesn't use the opam env I've
> already setup (specifically pins + repos).

If you can build from sources, there is fpm that can create a deb or 
rpm:

https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm

That's not a silver bullet, and it's not even specialized at ocaml 
software/opam pacakges, but sometimes it helps.

> Maybe opam itself would benefit from a tool that could take a package
> and produce the package information in a format easily consumable by
> other languages so others can more easily write tooling around it?
> Heck, that information would make it easier to writes something in
> ocaml.  I know this is one challenge I have, I *could* write some tools
> to make life easier but I don't have easy access to all the information
> in opam packages and poking around the opam libraries to build such a
> tool is too much effort for its priority for me.