solicitation for ocamlbuild examples to go in a new repository

solicitation for ocamlbuild examples to go in a new repository

[Erick Matsen]

Hello Ocaml-folk--


As the previous and many other posts on this list demonstrate, there
is a need for a collection of ocamlbuild examples which can be adapted
to various setting. I've started such a project (at Sylvain LeGall's
suggestion) at

http://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/obuild-examples/

I hope that the community will take a bit of time to sumbit examples.

I'd be very happy if others were interested in joining the project,
but it might be easiest just to email examples directly to me.

An ideal "package" from my perspective would have
- a short description of what it does, just a sentence or two.
- a commented myocamlbuild.ml file
- the corresponding _tags file

I hope to get examples of all levels, from very basic to advanced.
However, I think that there is a distinct need for simple examples
which do one or two interesting things (a flood of 10 page
myocamlbuild files isn't going to help people get off the ground).


Thanks,

Erick

Re: [Caml-list] solicitation for ocamlbuild examples to go in a new repository

[Guillaume Yziquel]

Erick Matsen a écrit :
> Hello Ocaml-folk--
> 
> As the previous and many other posts on this list demonstrate, there
> is a need for a collection of ocamlbuild examples which can be adapted
> to various setting. I've started such a project (at Sylvain LeGall's
> suggestion) at
> 
> http://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/obuild-examples/
> 
> I hope that the community will take a bit of time to sumbit examples.

The point is, in my humble opinion, that we do need examples, but we'd 
better try to have a generic plugin that solves most of the use cases. 
And *precise* documentation of ocamlbuild to be able to write such a 
plugin, or other plugins.

For now, the pain/benefit ratio of writing ocamlbuild plugins is clearly 
not worth it. Due to lack of documentation.

> I'd be very happy if others were interested in joining the project,
> but it might be easiest just to email examples directly to me.
> 
> An ideal "package" from my perspective would have
> - a short description of what it does, just a sentence or two.
> - a commented myocamlbuild.ml file
> - the corresponding _tags file

If you receive such examples, it would be useful to make them as generic 
as possible. There's no point, from a tutorial point of view, in having 
'complex' myocamlbuild plugins that you have to wrap your head around in 
order to reuse. I'm thinking about examples on the wiki pages.

> I hope to get examples of all levels, from very basic to advanced.
> However, I think that there is a distinct need for simple examples
> which do one or two interesting things (a flood of 10 page
> myocamlbuild files isn't going to help people get off the ground).

Yes. Exactly.

> Thanks,
> 
> Erick

There's definitely a know how out there. I'm thinking of bluestorm who 
helped me out with the ".inferred.mli" target for the plugin on the wiki.

http://brion.inria.fr/gallium/index.php/Using_ocamlfind_with_ocamlbuild

I gave feedback, and its been since then on the wiki page above.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but this plugin hasn't evolved much since then. I'm 
fairly disappointed that it has not been augmented to fit the needs of C 
stubs in a generic way.

All the best,

-- 
      Guillaume Yziquel
http://yziquel.homelinux.org/

Re: [Caml-list] solicitation for ocamlbuild examples to go in a new repository

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 08:07:15PM +0100, Guillaume Yziquel wrote:
> The point is, in my humble opinion, that we do need examples, but
> we'd better try to have a generic plugin that solves most of the use
> cases. And *precise* documentation of ocamlbuild to be able to write
> such a plugin, or other plugins.

AOL on that.

Besides, as long as it is hard to merge together examples that fit
different scenarios, the exercise risks to be even less useful. AFAIK,
currently the best proposed approach to easily combine different plugins
together is by the means of ocamlbuildplus [1], is there any other way
to do that as easily with legacy ocamlbuild?


Cheers.

[1] http://ocamlbuildplus.forge.ocamlcore.org/

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
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