Re: [Caml-list] Re: [ANN] OCaml Batteries Included, alpha 3

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Saturday 07 February 2009 14:43:49 Sylvain Le Gall wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On 07-02-2009, Mikkel Fahnøe Jørgensen <mikkel@dvide.com> wrote:
> > So in conclusion, Batteries is a very important contribution but we
> > must also improve on the tool chains and build environment.
> > ocamlbuild, flexdll, cross platform findlib and ocamlmklib are all
> > steps in the right direction.
>
> - ocamlbuild works on windows and linux
> - findlib works on windows and linux
>
> (however you need some tools from cygwin in some case like for building
> findlib)
>
> flexdll is not required directly (i think you don't need to invoke it
> directly) and ocamlmklib can be replaced by ocamlbuild.
>
> Building ocaml itself is still complicated on Windows (but not that much
> once you know how to do it), but I don't think you can easily address
> this problem in any way.
>
> So: what need to be improved?

Documentation! I tried to use ocamlbuild several times and gave up because I 
could not figure out how to do simple things.

I used Makefiles for a bit but make/ocamldep is so fragile that it broke so 
often I ended up doing "make clean; make" to rebuild at every edit. So now my 
method of choice is either writing the compile line out by hand every time or 
using a bash script that always recompiles everything.

Fortunately OCaml is ridiculously fast at compiling so there is almost no need 
for incremental compilation anyway. Although I would appreciate parallel 
builds...

> ps: I have no data concerning MacOS, FreeBSD and other

I managed to get Smoke compiled and running on Mac OS, which is LablGL as well 
as OCaml itself. I thought Mac OS X sucked but I can hardly blame OCaml for 
that. ;-)

-- 
Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e