Re: [Caml-list] Re: ocamlbuild

["Daniel Bünzli" <daniel.buenzli@erratique.ch>]

Le vendredi, 26 juillet 2013 à 08:25, Wojciech Meyer a écrit :
> I believe ocamlbuild HAS clear and sound design, more than other
> tools. In fact many ideas in ocamlbuild are novel, and interesting, this
> is the major reason I maintain it, otherwise I'd not be interested in
> doing so.


I completely agree. When it came out I jumped on the project --- was burned out by a recursive make file trying to compile only things that changed across developing libraries used by another developing project; using just ocamlbuild, a _tags file and symlinks solved it all in a minute.

However:

* A wiki is not documentation. The reference document that documents the conceptual model of ocamlbuild, the available tags and their effects and a clear/understandable documentation of the *API* are still missing. How does ocamlbuild build your project, how does it compute dependencies, how does it track changes, etc.  

* Given our struggles with myocamlbuild.ml I wonder whether the current API is the right one or if it's just a matter of the missing documentation. And this is from a person who has written significant myocamlbuild.ml plugins [1,2]. If that is a sign of something my current strategy is to switch to a mixture of shell scripts and ocamlbuild invocations to side-step myocamlbuild.ml whenever possible.

* Easy built-in support for C stubs/libraries is missing. E.g. I'd be glad if I hadn't to write a myocamlbuild.ml file for a simple project like this [3].

Best,

Daniel

[1] http://brion.inria.fr/gallium/index.php/Compiling_C_with_gcc
[2] http://darcs.ocamlcore.org/ocamlunix/myocamlbuild.ml
[3] https://github.com/dbuenzli/rpng