Re: [Caml-list] odb questions

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

Le mercredi, 7 mars 2012 à 16:58, Edgar Friendly a écrit :

> > IMHO a package should be identified by a name and version.
>  
> I've been thinking about this for a long time, and the full consequences  
> of this involve not only deep changes to odb internals, but also expose  
> the code to a ton more edge cases that need to be handled, as well as  
> possibly some NP-hard problems of resolving version dependencies.  

Without going into the dependency resolving thing, I still think it's an issue. Basically with odb you don't really know what you are downloading.  

For example I wanted to reinstall oasis, didn't have *any* clue which version I would get, went to oasis.ocamlcore.org, saw that v0.3.0rc2 was uploaded there so I expected to get that, ended with 0.2.1~alpha1. Had I knew before I would just have added a direct link to the new release in my `packages` files.  

Didn't really think hard about it, but instead of (or complementary to) defining it's own key-value language odb could maybe piggyback on oasis files (pretty easy to parse). There's a lot of info in there (deps etc.). So having something like :  

<pkg> tarball=http://link/to/<pkg>.tbz oasis=http://link/to/<pkg>.oasis

so that you can explore basic information about the package before even trying to download it (alternatively download the tarball and look for an oasis file to spit out, but then if that's not what you wanted you already wasted the bandwidth)

So an odb -info <pkg> that spits out an oasis file if any is available would be nice aswell as an odb -deps <pkg>.  

Best,

Daniel