Re: [Caml-list] One build system to rule them all?

[Maxence Guesdon <maxence.guesdon@inria.fr>]

On Wed, 10 Sep 2014 15:29:18 +0200
Francois Berenger <francois.berenger@inria.fr> wrote:

> On 09/10/2014 02:49 PM, Yotam Barnoy wrote:
> > It appears to me that every couple of months we hear of someone
> > implementing yet another build system in ocaml. Given the success of
> > opam, I think it's clear that sometimes a monolithic solution, behind
> > which the entire community can organize, is the best solution --
> > especially for infrastructure. Looking at haskell, having cabal as the
> > main build system has really helped them advance in terms of supporting
> > other platforms (such as windows), and since all community efforts in
> > this realm are focused on cabal, they can improve it rapidly.
> >
> > a. Is there any build system we can organize behind to crown as the
> > official build system?
> > b. What are the use-cases missing from specific build systems, that have
> > driven people to use other build systems?
> > c. To pick one possible candidate, if ocamlbuild were spun out of the
> > compiler, could it be enhanced to cover all the main use-cases so
> > (almost) everyone would be happy with it?
> >
> > It's just such a shame to see the ocaml community re-inventing the wheel
> > over and over again, each time with some limitation so that the next
> > person needs to do the same thing yet again.
> 
> It is not a shame, it is a tradition in the ocaml community! :-D
> For example, almost each ocaml programmer that I know of have written a 
> logger (me included, it's even in opam so that I can reinvent another 
> wheel next time).
> 
> More seriously, concerning build systems, we clearly have quite some
> choice on the OCaml shelf:
> - obuild
> - ocamlbuild
> - omake
> - oasis (which in fact uses ocamlbuild, don't forget that)
> - jenga
> - [...]

I can't resist to add good old Make to the list, not specific to OCaml,
yet powerful enough and known by a lot of developers.

Regards,

Maxence