RE: [Caml-list] [newbie] miscellaneous on installation and web site

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

Marco Maggi wrote:
> Ciao,
> 
>   I am a  True Beginner taking a look at  O'Caml; I hope not to  be
> abusing  by posting  here rather  than  the beginners list.

Building OCaml from source is definitely not a beginners' question! :o)

>   I  think  I   successfully  compiled  ocaml-3.11.2  on  my
> i686-pc-linux-gnu, but  there seems to be no  way to install the package
> in  a temporary location via the  Linux de facto standard DESTDIR
> environment variable;  is there a way to do it?  (I am used to build
> custom packages.)

I've not come across that way before (by which I mean "you learn a new thing
every day"!), the more usual way, which will work with OCaml, is to specify
a different root for the -prefix option when you run configure. make install
will then install OCaml there. I used to use that when compiling uses OCaml
on a machine for which I didn't have root and I used it just the other day
to compile OCaml 3.12.0 on Maemo so the switch definitely works.

All that said, what distro are you using? Debian and Fedora (and *BSD) all
have native packages for OCaml.

>   The  web site[1]  is beautiful  (no  irony) but  a lot  of
> informations look outdated, 4/5 years old; I see many O'Caml related
> sites on  the Net.  Is there one that  I can take as reference  for  the
> latest  news,  for  example about  still maintained library packages?

The Caml Hump I believe has up-to-date information as long as it's
submitted. I'm quite lazy and tend only to look for updates to libraries I
use when either I hit a bug or am installing on a new machine ...
www.ocamlcore.org is a pretty good place to start, I think.


David