Re: [Caml-list] Re: [ANN] OCaml Batteries Included, alpha 3

[Matthieu Dubuget <matthieu.dubuget@gmail.com>]

David Rajchenbach-Teller a écrit :
> On Sat, 2009-02-07 at 17:13 +0100, Matthieu Dubuget wrote:
>> An other points that could be improved, concerning ocamlbuild are:
>> - modules (planned, but I don't know how many time the owners of
>> ocamlbuild have?)
> 
> I don't quite understand this.

>From the very beginning, I had the feeling that ocamlbuild's author
had planned to make the monolithic myocamlbuild system more modular.
I may be wrong.

My idea is that it would be very useful if one could specify other
modules to compile and use (and the associated command line if
necessary) instead of copy-paste everything needed into myocamlbuild.

> 
>> - better integration with findlib (modules would help, and also the
>> possibility to use directly findlib modules from ocamlbuild modules)
> 
> The myocamlbuild.ml provided with Batteries Included manages findlib
> (that's actually based on an extract provided in the documentation of
> OCamlBuild).

Yes. I'm aware of that. But the tags associated to each package are
constructed by calling ocamlfind as an external process, and parsing the
output of ocamlfind. It would be cleaner and certainly more powerful if
myocamlbuild module could use directly the findlib library provided with
findlib?

My development tree is composed of a lot of libraries. They have
inter-dependencies. I would like to use ocamlfind more consistently,
because this is very a nice tool. When properly configured, if I want to
use Toto, i just have to add the toto package, and all dependencies and
link options are sorted automatically.

If I modify one library which is known by ocamlfind, I would like to be
able to have all other packages that depends on it to be compiled again,
and finally the target I'm working on. This not easy to achieve.

And when I extract a fresh tree from my repository, I would like to have
everything compiled and installed with an ocamlbuild all.otarget command.

But I may be wrong by mixing the two levels: building with ocamlbuild
and library use with ocamlfind.

Sorry if all this is not clear, but it is not (yet) very clear for me…

Salutations

Matt

P.S. When writing this post, I had a new idea that may simplify my
problem: adding my development tree to findlib.conf path seems enough to
let findlib find and use my own packages, without having to install them.