Re: [Caml-list] Building O'Caml projects properly.

[Markus Mottl <markus@mail4.ai.univie.ac.at>]

On Sat, 29 Sep 2001, Jeremy Fincher wrote:
> I'm not very experienced with make, so I've been using Markus Mottl's
> OcamlMakefile in my projects so far.  In one of my projects, I use
> source files from two other small libraries I've written; at present,
> I just have a whole lot of files in my SOURCES and a bunch of symlinks
> to the proper files in the proper directories.  However, I'd really
> like to be able to improve my build process, and I think a good way to
> do that is to isolate in directories the other libraries I've written.

"make" is notoriously bad at handling project dependencies across several
directories. This means that it imposes some work on the developers to
behave as they want it to.

If you want to do what I usually do, your project tree should look
somewhat like this:

  ./
    Makefile
    OcamlMakefile
    lib/
    libsrc/
      lib1/...
      lib2/...
      lib3/...
    src/
      Makefile
      src1.ml
      src2.ml
      ...

Your Makefile in the toplevel could contain something like this:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
OCAML_LIB_INSTALL := $(shell echo `pwd`/lib)
LIBSRC := $(filter-out libsrc/CVS, $(wildcard libsrc/*))

all:    libsrc
	cd src; $(MAKE) all

.PHONY: libsrc
libsrc:
	for dir in $(LIBSRC); do (cd $$dir; yes | $(MAKE) install); done
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

If all your libraries follow the OcamlMakefile install conventions, they
will be installed in directory "lib". Then your Makefile in directory
"src" can refer to your libraries as usual:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
OCAMLMAKEFILE = ../OcamlMakefile

SOURCES = src1.ml src2.ml ...
RESULT = myexe
LIBDIRS = ../lib
INCDIRS = ../lib

-include $(OCAMLMAKEFILE)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Enter "make" in the toplevel directory of your project, and everything
will be compiled. People usually do not edit their libraries all the
time so you only need to issue "make" in your "src"-directory in most
cases (very efficient).  When you change some library, issue a "make"
in the toplevel again and make sure that your "src"-tree will be rebuilt
correctly. If insure in the last case, a "make clean; make" in directory
"src" will do what you want.

I hope this will help you getting started with more complex projects!

Regards,
Markus Mottl

-- 
Markus Mottl                                             markus@oefai.at
Austrian Research Institute
for Artificial Intelligence                  http://www.oefai.at/~markus
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