[Caml-list] Re: OCaml on Amazon EC2 Instance

[Caml-list] Re: OCaml on Amazon EC2 Instance

[Jeffrey Scofield]

Greetings OCaml list,

Thanks very much for the suggestions for getting OCaml installed
on Amazon EC2.  I'm going to save them for future use.

We just wanted to do some fairly quick testing, so I was looking
for something simple.  Since Amazon Linux is compatible with CentOS 6,
what I ended up doing is installing the CentOS 6.2 OCaml package
on my EC2 instance.  I wrote up a description of how to do it
here:

    http://psellos.com/2012/06/2012.06.ocaml-amazon-ec2.html

We've run our first round of tests, and it all seems to be working.

Maybe this will be useful to other OCamlers.

Regards,

Jeffrey

[Caml-list] Re: OCaml on Amazon EC2 Instance

[Richard W.M. Jones]

In RHEL, OCaml is in the Optional channel.

Various other people take RHEL packages, recompile them, remove the
RHEL branding and add their own.  CentOS, Scientific Linux etc.  These
distros will take all the packages and recompile them and make them
available.

Since they are not usually concerned with support, they'll just
distribute all the packages together.  For example, in CentOS the
ocaml package is mixed in with all the others:

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6.2/os/x86_64/Packages/ocaml-3.11.2-2.el6.x86_64.rpm

Now I've no idea what Amazon Linux are up to, but they've somehow lost
the OCaml package, which is a problem for Amazon Linux.  If this is
true it doesn't sound like a very competent derivative of RHEL, and I
don't know of any other RHEL derivative distribution which has had any
problem distributing the OCaml packages.  (Even worse really because
'createrepo' would have told them that dependencies are missing ...)

In fact according to this:
https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/2012.03-packages/#o
it looks like they've missed out all the ocaml-* packages from RHEL.
I've no idea what they're doing.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat

[Caml-list] Re: OCaml on Amazon EC2 Instance

[Jeffrey Scofield]

Hi Rich,

> RHEL itself includes OCaml, so it's normal for EPEL not to
> have OCaml, but to have several additional libraries for OCaml.

It seems a little tricky since OCaml is in the Optional Channel of RHEL.
(I'm not sure how it all fits together, maybe this isn't quite the right
way to describe it.)  Perhaps this makes things difficult for other
releases that are trying to use EPEL (like Amazon Linux).  The EPEL page
seems to say it's supposed to work with other Linux variants.

There's some evidence that CentOS has solved the problem (by supporting
OCaml packages directly in their base release).  This suggests that
Amazon Linux is the odd one out.  I'll try to send Amazon a feature
request for OCaml, if I can figure out how.

But it would also be cool if EPEL decided to support OCaml directly.
If they're really independent of RHEL, seems like they maybe should.

> It sounds to me as if "Amazon Linux" is broken, or you need
> to enable something.


While googling I saw a few other "Amazon Linux" users who were looking for
packages that seem to have fallen through the cracks.

> One thing you might try is looking in /etc/yum.repos.d and
> see if anything is "enabled=0" which should be "enabled=1".

Thanks; this is something I thought to try.  It didn't make any
difference for OCaml support.

Thanks again for the help.

Jeffrey
Seattle WA