Re: [Caml-list] OCaml maintenance status / community fork (again)

["Stéphane Glondu" <steph@glondu.net>]

Le 14/12/2011 13:13, Gerd Stolpmann a écrit :
> Not yet, but this is certainly not impossible with a to-be-written
> package converter.
> 
> So far, there has been nobody who investigated this in detail.
> (Actually, I'm a bit surprised that none of the OS packagers had the
> idea yet - this could save a lot of time for them.)

There is alien [1]. However, I don't really see the point when you
already have access to quality native packages, and I usually prefer to
run directly upstream's "./configure && make && make install" for stuff
that are not already packaged (and, sometimes, I package it myself :).
For system-wide installation, I usually use checkinstall [2] to register
it to my package manager. Alien and checkinstall cannot be used to make
redistributable packages, though, and they are quite Linux-centric.

[1] http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/alien/
[2] http://checkinstall.izto.org/

My humble opinion about all these packaging issues is that the OCaml
community is just too small (and/or lacks dedicated people) to create
and maintain a quality package set that can be advertised to attract
more people. Moreover, most OCaml stuff are for the OCaml community,
which is quite a restricted audience. In my experience (in Debian), the
"written in OCaml" argument works only for people who know and program
in OCaml already, and tends to make others flee. On the other way, there
are many applications written in e.g. Python that are popular, and you
know that they are written in Python only by looking at the source code.

Maybe people should write more end-user applications in OCaml (but
neither scientific nor OCaml-centric) to promote OCaml better. Like
unison, ledit, mldonkey, etc. And be reactive to external contributions
(be it bugreports, feature wishes or patches), so that people get
progressively contaminated by the OCaml virus :-)


Cheers,

-- 
Stéphane