Compiling a library with findlib

Compiling a library with findlib

[Sébastien Hinderer]

Dear all,

I am wondering what would be cleanest way of compiling a library
including C stubs using the ocamlfind program.

The library consists in the files lib.ml, lib.mli, lib_stubs.c and
constants.ml which is generated by awk scripts from C sources.

For the moment, the configure script detects wether ocamlfind is
installed or not. If it is not installed, ocamlmklib is used and
produces lib.cma, lib.cmxa, lib.a and lib.so which all seem to be
useful.

When ocamlfind is installed, though, I have no idea how to produce lib.a
and lib.so which seem to be necessary.
In particular, ocamlfind does not seem to have an interface to the
ocamlmklib connand.
So the questions I have are:

1. Is it necessary to compile/install the lib;a and lib.so files ?
2. How can these files be produced (in addition to the .cma and .cmxa
files) on a system where ocamlfindlib is installed ?

Thanks a lot for your help,
Sébastien.

Re: [Caml-list] Compiling a library with findlib

[Eric Cooper]

On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 09:06:09AM +0200, Sébastien Hinderer wrote:
> I am wondering what would be cleanest way of compiling a library
> including C stubs using the ocamlfind program.

If you use the OCamlMakefile, the "byte-code-library" and
"native-code-library" targets take care of this very painlessly.

-- 
Eric Cooper             e c c @ c m u . e d u

Re: Compiling a library with findlib

[Sébastien Hinderer]

Hi,

Eric Cooper :
> On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 09:06:09AM +0200, Sébastien Hinderer wrote:
> > I am wondering what would be cleanest way of compiling a library
> > including C stubs using the ocamlfind program.
> 
> If you use the OCamlMakefile, the "byte-code-library" and
> "native-code-library" targets take care of this very painlessly.

As I said, I'd prefer not to use OCamlMakefile if possible... Does such
a choice look unwise to you all ?

Cheers,
Sébastien.

Re: [Caml-list] Re: Compiling a library with findlib

[Robert Roessler]

Sébastien Hinderer wrote:
> ...
> As I said, I'd prefer not to use OCamlMakefile if possible... Does such
> a choice look unwise to you all ?

Not at all... but then, perhaps like you, I believe that "make" is 
perfectly adequate for most small-to-medium build tasks, and that 
truly "open" software is designed to be built with standard tools 
available in either the stock distribution of OCaml or at least easily 
found for the dominant platforms: Windows, the major *nix distros, and 
Mac OS X. ;)

Robert Roessler
roessler@rftp.com
http://www.rftp.com

Re: [Caml-list] Re: Compiling a library with findlib

[Eric Cooper]

On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 03:06:36AM -0700, Robert Roessler wrote:
> Sébastien Hinderer wrote:
> >...
> >As I said, I'd prefer not to use OCamlMakefile if possible... Does such
> >a choice look unwise to you all ?
> 
> Not at all... but then, perhaps like you, I believe that "make" is 
> perfectly adequate for most small-to-medium build tasks, and that 
> truly "open" software is designed to be built with standard tools 
> available in either the stock distribution of OCaml or at least easily 
> found for the dominant platforms: Windows, the major *nix distros, and 
> Mac OS X. ;)

Sorry, I must have missed the OP's objection to using OCamlMakefile.
But in any case, it's just a (big, complex) Makefile, so even if you
don't want to use it as-is, you can look at what it does, and adopt a
subset of its rules for your application.

-- 
Eric Cooper             e c c @ c m u . e d u

Re: Re: Compiling a library with findlib

[Sébastien Hinderer]

Robert Roessler :
> Not at all... but then, perhaps like you, I believe that "make" is 
> perfectly adequate for most small-to-medium build tasks, and that 
> truly "open" software is designed to be built with standard tools 
> available in either the stock distribution of OCaml or at least easily 
> found for the dominant platforms: Windows, the major *nix distros, and 
> Mac OS X. ;)

Agreed.
Sébastien.