From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id QAA17052; Fri, 28 Feb 2003 16:59:03 +0100 (MET) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id QAA16825 for ; Fri, 28 Feb 2003 16:59:01 +0100 (MET) Received: from saul.cis.upenn.edu (SAUL.CIS.UPENN.EDU [158.130.12.4]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id h1SFx0H15819 for ; Fri, 28 Feb 2003 16:59:01 +0100 (MET) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by saul.cis.upenn.edu (8.12.5/8.12.5) with SMTP id h1SFwFqO022357; Fri, 28 Feb 2003 10:58:15 -0500 (EST) To: Sven Luther cc: Jean-Christophe Filliatre , Jacques Garrigue , roberto@dicosmo.org, caml-list@inria.fr Reply-to: bcpierce@cis.upenn.edu Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Alternative proposal: COAN In-reply-to: Your message of Fri, 28 Feb 2003 15:43:10 +0100. <20030228144310.GA4555@iliana> Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 10:58:15 EST Message-ID: <22356.1046447895@saul.cis.upenn.edu> From: "Benjamin C. Pierce" Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk Seems like maybe the beginnings of a minimalist proposal are beginning to emerge from the discussion... - Using a "hump" model -- centrally stored meta-data pointing to actual package contents stored on people's individual servers and updated at will -- avoids uploading/mirroring issues. In fact, the current hump seems almost right -- it just needs - to be minimally machine readable (perhaps just able to export its DB in some simple XML format) - to have some way of indicating dependencies - to include pointers directly to package contents (not to people's web pages where packages can be found, etc.) For a notation for signalling dependencies, a little work is needed. But I have the impression that there are a number of people in the community that understand the issues rather well, and that a pretty simple solution would be good enough for 99.9% of the cases... For pointers to package contents, one should establish a common file naming convention -- e.g., record the URL of the package contents in the COAN as http://hostname.fr/path/mynicepackage-VERSION.tar.gz and store versions 1.2, 1.3, 1.5 on the server as http://hostname.fr/path/mynicepackage-1.2.tar.gz http://hostname.fr/path/mynicepackage-1.3.tar.gz http://hostname.fr/path/mynicepackage-1.5.tar.gz - Let people write their makefiles in whatever way they like, use findlib or not as they prefer, etc., but establish a minimal set of common requirements -- e.g. - saying just 'make install' should do configuration if necessary, build bytecode and (if possible) native versions, and put them where they belong - DESTDIR should be treated appropriately - etc. Again, there are several people in the community that have, among them, a pretty clear sense of what these minimal requirements should look like. (I know there is some disagreement about details, but as a developer I don't really care -- I just want someone to decide on something reasonable and publish a template that I can follow if I want to contribute my code to the community.) I'd love it if three or four of them could just get together, decide something reasonable, discuss it with the OCaml authors to make sure they agree, and tell the rest of us what to do. I nominate Marcus, Jean-Christophe, Gerd, and Sven. :-) -- Benjamin ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners