Re: [Caml-list] OCaml on Debian or Ububtu (reprise)

[Chad Perrin <perrin@apotheon.com>]

On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 02:13:20AM +0100, Philippe Wang wrote:
> Chad Perrin a écrit :
> 
> >I'm afraid you must not be very familiar with the current state of
> >affairs in Debian.  For the last three years, I've been using XFS, from
> >a choice of more than a half-dozen different filesystem types, with
> >Debian installs.  JFS, FAT, and other filesystem types are also
> >available.
> 
> I mean that when you take the default install CD, you don't have other 
> choice but ext2, ext3 and reiserFS.
> I really didn't mean one couldn't use another FS...
> 
> (but maybe I'm wrong... When I saw I could only use ext[2|3] and 
> reiserFS at the prompt when I put the last debian CD (i don't know which 
> version, but a 2006 version anyways) I just gave up the idea because I 
> didn't want reiserFS and ext3 takes too much time to build)

Every Debian install I've done since the new debian-installer was
adopted for Sarge while it was still in Testing has allowed custom
partitioning with any of a wide range of filesystems.  I suspect you are
either not using the default debian-installer or you are not configuring
the partitions with all the available tools if you are not aware of
other filesystems that are available at install time.


> 
> >OCaml support in Debian is excellent.  It's rock-solid, in fact.  Ubuntu
> >tends to be a little bit less reliable in terms of its less-mainstream
> >packages, but that doesn't mean that its OCaml support is lacking -- I
> >haven't tried using OCaml on Ubuntu, so you'll have to get such
> >information from someone else.  As you (Philippe Wang) seem to indicate,
> >OCaml support is at least "good enough" in Ubuntu, in which case I agree
> >that choice of distribution should probably be based on some other factor
> >if the field of options before you is Ubuntu and Debian (though as I
> >pointed out above it's possible that the differences in Ubuntu and
> >Debian might still play a role in making the best choice).
> 
> To me, it's quite weird to make the choice mainly because of OCaml 
> support. I mean if Ubuntu and Debian have come to have the same score 
> and OCaml support is goind to tell which one wins, it's really strange 
> to me. But well, why not...

I can understand it, to some degree, if one's purpose in choosing a
distribution for a given install is to have the best possible OCaml
development environment.


> Still I believe the choice should be based on other distrib features.

. . . but I tend to agree that there are a number of other, more
important reasons for choosing a distribution, most of the time.  Such
reasons have, in fact, caused me to mostly give up Debian in favor of
FreeBSD recently -- which also provides excellent OCaml support in its
ports tree.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Brian K. Reid: "In computer science, we stand on each other's feet."