Re: [Caml-list] Alternative proposal: COAN

["Nicolas Cannasse" <warplayer@free.fr>]

> One last comment on Windows. Since most development is taking place on
> Unix, I think this is reasonnable to make the presence of basic cygwin
> tools a requirement for compiling packages. The presence of gnu make
> and some shell commands should be enough for most. Handling of C
> libraries is more complex, but this must often be handled also at the
> source level.

The need of having cygwin installed if you're not using the cygwin ocaml
version is quite a problem. I totally agree with you when you say that OCaml
binary distributions are not suitable (right now - maybe later). But that
goes for the Caml part of the package, and not really for the C stubs.
As a windows Ocaml user, I would strongly recommend that the package authors
who wants to support the Win32 target do the following :
- if the package only contains Caml code, release a full source code
- if the package contains both Caml and C stubs :
    * release the full source code using gnu/shell tools for compiling (for
unix users and windows users who are familiar with such tools)
    * release a half-binary Windows code where the C compiled dll/lib are
provided with the full Caml source code only ( a separate tool like ocamake
can handle the compilation )

For all things concerning installation, I think it's far more easy on
windows than on unix systems, and so should be handled separatly (a caml
written tool not relying on cygwin shell tools should be enough, according
that the package author provide a minimum information on
how-to-install-it ).

PS : I'm a cygwin gnu/shell tools user, but I personnaly think that most of
windows developpers are not willing to do so, and that providing tools for
it is more in the windows-way-of-thinking.

Waiting for comments,

Nicolas Cannasse

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