Dear David,

 

Note that your Cygwin build-route really is missing a step – you’re bootstrapping, so the final stage should be recompiling flexlink using your new ocamlopt (the compilers do indeed need flexlink), then the dependency on Cygwin disappears. For my own builds, I extract flexlink.exe from Alain’s binary distribution, build the FlexDLL objects from sources, compile OCaml and then recompile flexlink.exe using the that fresh compiler and replace the earlier binary copy. See, for example, https://github.com/dra27/OCaml-Windows-Build/blob/master/build.cmd#L527-L570

 

Sure, if I go this way, I should do this. But it looks like a bit of overkill to build a native ocaml compiler to bootstrap flexdll. Also Ocaml is not very good at handling different compiler variants, so I would have to uninstall the native Ocaml after building flexdll. So for the time being I am using the binary version. I think about compiling flexlink from sources after building Ocaml.

 

At some point, I was going to alter things so that FlexDLL is the only requirement for pre-installation (as that can be built from source) and have the ocaml process use boot/flexlink if a binary flexlink isn’t available… but as that’s only to satisfy a religious fervour to remove the circular dependency, it’s right down at the bottom of my personal task list, especially as I doubt it would be merged :o)

 

True, it is not a showstopper. I just mentioned it here to make sure I didn’t overlook something.

 

Best regards,

 

Michael

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