Re: Problems to get larger user base ... (Re: [Caml-list] OCaml's variables)

[Chet Murthy <murthy.chet@gmail.com>]

On Thursday, May 30, 2013 09:45:51 AM Francois Berenger wrote:
> By the way, is there some plan to support binary packages
> at some point in time with OPAM?
> 
> I don't mean OCamlPro distributing them but for an OPAM
> user to be able to create them locally.
> 
> That would speedup the process of installing software (given they
> have at least been compiled once).

This.

OK.  A little more.  OPAM is already a tremendous improvement.  But to
really make it possible to build -systems- in Ocaml, you have to be
able to distribute collections of programs, config, and libraries,
across multiple (admittedly identical) machines.  And distribute
updates to same.  OPAM is in some ways like BSD ports -- it works
great for maintaining single machines from source-code.

But what's needed is a way to maintain -many- machines, and to
distribute updates in a granular manner that be -managed- -- rolled
forward, rolled back, with full knowledge of which versions of which
packages are being installed.  And everything with -zero- version
skew.  So any nondeterminism happened at buiild-time -- by
deploy-time, all machines are getting identical files with identical
timestamps.

It's a tall order, b/c OPAM will need to figure out how to capture
enough of the environment (in order to check it on the target machine
where a binary is installed) to verify whether it's safe to install
that binary.  But boy would it be nice.

And as a bonus, we could wrapper opam in the debian apparatus (I
think) and get a really nice way to turn opam packages into debian
packages.

--chet--