Re: [Caml-list] OSR - "Batteries included" - Standardizing syntax extensions and extra libraries

["Hezekiah M. Carty" <hcarty@atmos.umd.edu>]

On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 12:12 PM, Berke Durak <berke.durak@exalead.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
>  David Teller suggested that I launch a thread on my suggestion at the end of the
>  "different records, same field name?" thread.
>
>  The idea is to define, as part of the OSR process, a list of
>  "standard" syntax extensions and libraries.  A meta-distribution of Ocaml would
>  then include, for every element of the ocaml toolchain, a version that has
>  access to those extensions and libraries.  The name of the extended tool would
>  be obtained by adding an "s" to the original name.
>
>  Hence, assuming that we agree that Alain Frisch's openin and, say, Pcre should
>  be part of the standard, then
>
>    ocamlcs (resp. ocamlopts)
>
>  would be a script calling ocamlc (resp. ocamlopt) with options
>
>   -I +pcre -pp pa_openin
>
>  Then we'd tell people new to Ocaml to use those instead; the existing users
>  will be told to just add an "s".

I like this idea, and think that it would make getting started with
OCaml and its libraries much easier for new users.

>
>  A few switches such as -only unix,pcre should be added to ocamlcs to prevent it
>  from linking it everything if this is a concern.

If ocamlfind were included as a standard part of the community OCaml
distribution, then I think it would ease this process significantly.
The standard set of libraries and syntax extensions could be checked
against the proposed extra switches (-onlylibs/-exceptlibs/-libs) and
used accordingly.  The user would only need to know the ocamlfind name
of the library they wish to include/exclude.  The script would not
have to keep track of including or excluding the proper directories
for each new library which comes along in the ocaml(c|opt) search path
since ocamlfind takes care of this.  I think ocamlfind/findlib
supports syntax extension packages as well - if it does then these
could be handled in the same way.

Hez

-- 
Hezekiah M. Carty
Graduate Research Assistant
University of Maryland
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science