Re: [Caml-list] oasis building out-of-src and camlp4

[Magnus Therning <magnus@therning.org>]

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On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 11:19:57AM +0200, Gabriel Scherer wrote:
> > Indeed, the goal is to not contaminate the source directory *at all*.
> 
> You could, in the "external build" command passed to CMake, wrap the
> build invocation with code to create the symlinks before the build,
> and remove them after the build.

Yes, CMake lets me do pretty much anything, but it does make the build a
little more complex and I'm already sneaking in OCaml without telling ;)

> That said, If I understand oasis' philosophy correctly (but I'm far
> from an expert), the file that are generated by the oasis setup are
> not to be understood as "generated files never to be looked at", but
> rather *source* files that you may want to modify and customize
> yourself, and just contain some snippets produced by oasis. I would
> understand this as a kind of "we created the basic boilerplate
> structure of your project for you", rather than "those are hidden
> files only used during the build". In particular, you may be expected
> to include these files in your version-control repository (something I
> have been a bit reluctant to do myself; I think that the newish
> "dynamic" setup mode of oasis avoids versioning any cruft).

Yes, I am aware of that, and with "dynamic" mode `oasis` seems to
generate little enough that I wouldn't mind putting it in VCS.

> > Since the steps work on "simple"
> > code, but doesn't on code using `camlp4` I'm leaning towards calling
> > this a bug.
> 
> I'll let oasis developers triage this issue, but it is not as clear as
> you describe. It's not that this oasis setup works in simple cases and
> breaks in other, but rather than oasis does not support this setup at
> all, yet sometimes ocamlbuild can do what it needs without any help
> whatsoever.

I tend to land in the camp of "if the behaviour is surprising (without
delighting) to a user, then it's a bug".  I'm fully aware that what I'm
trying to do might not have been a scenario the `oasis` devs ever
considered.

> <src/...>). But I like the idea and created a feature request to track
> it:
>   http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=6997

Thanks, I'll keep an eye on that request.

> But if you go this route, it means that you would have to wait for the
> next ocamlbuild release, so an oasis-level solution or workaround
> would currently be more helpful for you.

For the time being I get by with using `ocamlbuild` (via `corebuild`)
and its `-build-dir` option.  Hopefully there'll be more support for
out-of-source building when I get to the point of replacing all C code
with OCaml ;)

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                      OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4 
email: magnus@therning.org   jabber: magnus@therning.org
twitter: magthe               http://therning.org/magnus

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will
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would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.
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