Notes from testing OCaml 3.11.0+beta1 on Fedora

[Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org>]

Fedora compiled most of our OCaml packages for 3.11.0+beta1 now.  Here
are my notes on this, which I hope prove helpful for anyone else
trying out 3.11.

Firstly you can get any of the packages / patches we are using through
our CVS repo here: http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/devel/

Packages _other_ than those listed below built without any problems
and are available from my temporary repository
(http://www.annexia.org/tmp/mingw/fedora-10/x86_64).  They will
eventually get built in Fedora 11.  Fedora 10 (released next week)
will continue to be based on OCaml 3.10.2.


Base ocaml package
------------------------------

Here are the patches we are carrying (NB especially patch 6):

Patch0:         ocaml-3.11.0-rpath.patch
Patch1:         ocaml-user-cflags.patch
# Support for PPC64 platform by David Woodhouse:
Patch3:         ocaml-3.11.0-ppc64.patch
# This is a patch from upstream which fixes PR#4637, PR#4582.
# http://camlcvs.inria.fr/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ocaml/stdlib/string.ml.diff?r1=text&tr1
=1.29&r2=text&tr2=1.28
# commonly manifested as errors thrown saying:
# Invalid_argument("String.index_from")
Patch6:         ocaml-3.11.0-string-index-from.patch

These are the patches we have removed since 3.10.2, which we believe
are no longer necessary:

# Patch to work with new TCL versions:
#Patch2:         ocaml-3.10.0-tclver.patch
# Not needed because the GC allocator was completely rewritten:
#Patch4:         ocaml-3.10.1-map32bit.patch
# A similar fix went upstream in 3.11.0:
#Patch5:         ocaml-3.11-dev12-no-executable-stack.patch


cduce
------------------------------

Camlp4 parsing problem:

Build runtime/print_xml.cmx
File "runtime/print_xml.ml", line 110, characters 35-37:
Parse error: [expr level ;] expected after "in" (in [expr])
File "runtime/print_xml.ml", line 1, characters 0-1:
Error: Preprocessor error
make: 
*** [runtime/print_xml.cmx] Error 2


cmigrep
------------------------------

Small patch required, sent upstream (see our CVS).


coq
------------------------------

Strange camlp4 problem, not yet resolved.  Maybe just a missing
BuildRequires:

OCAMLC    lib/pp.mli
OCAMLC4   lib/pp.ml4
sh: camlp4o: command not found
File "lib/pp.ml4", line 1, characters 0-1:
Error: Preprocessor error


freetennis
------------------------------

Since we upgraded to camlimages 3.0.1, freetennis is looking for a
library called ci_core.cmxa which no longer appears to exist.
Upstream seems to be dead on this one.


ocaml-bitstring
------------------------------

Small patch required to fix a camlp4 parsing problem, not yet upstream
(see our CVS).


ocaml-cil
------------------------------

Build system failure - I didn't look very closely at this yet.


ocaml-ocamlgraph
------------------------------

There seem to be a number of build problems with the 1.0 release of
ocamlgraph.  I'm not sure if these are related to 3.11.0 or not.


ocaml-omake
------------------------------

Undefined reference to caml_sync.  Not looked into this yet.


ocaml-pa-monad
------------------------------

Stricter module naming restrictions in 3.11:

ocamlc -warn-error AX -g  -pp 'camlp4orf -I . pa_monad.cmo' -c pythagorean-triples.ml
File "pythagorean-triples.ml", line 1, characters 0-1:
Warning X: bad source file name: "Pythagorean-triples" is not a valid module name.
File "pythagorean-triples.ml", line 1, characters 0-1:
Error: Error-enabled warnings (1 occurrences)


type-conv & sexplib
------------------------------

These work fine, but you must upgrade to the latest versions.


virt-df
------------------------------

camlp4 parsing problem, not yet resolved.



Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat