[Caml-list] About ocamlbuild

[Pierre-Etienne Meunier <pierreetienne.meunier@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Several ocamlbuild-related questions:

1 - Is there a simple reason why ocamlbuild is a tool with plugins and not a library ? It would be much easier to adapt it to other contexts than ocaml compiling, and to larger projects. In my projects, a myocamlbuild.ml file must be written most of the time, so I do not understand the point.
Another point I see is that I usually spend a non-negligible part of my time writing makefiles and myocamlbuild files. Since I must do it anyway, I'd like to write all that in pure ocaml, doing argument parsing as I want, adding arguments if I want, and even doing some configure steps in ocaml before starting to compile anything. Using output_value to do this (as I did for http://lama.univ-savoie.fr/~meunier/camlimages for instance) is much easier than outputing _tags and .mlpack in subdirectories.
Also, it would be nice to allow it to depend on other modules, even of some files of the project you are compiling. Examples of uses include configuration options, versions, etc.

2 - Also, I do not understand why I get the following message:

Failure: Included or excluded directories must be implicit (not "../_build").

Is it a technical restriction to avoid copying entire filesystems to _build if the _tags are ill-written, or is there another reason ?

3 - Finally, I find the idea of tags good, for backward compatibility reasons (you do not have to change your code), but not enough. For instance, in haskell (and some compilers written in ocaml), you can add "tags" at the beginning of your files. You would start your ocaml files with comments such as:

(* #OPTIONS -rectypes *)


Thanks,
Pierre