From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr (mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.82]) by walapai.inria.fr (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id pBGCdQ4Z003243 for ; Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:39:26 +0100 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AggBAH47607B/BfWkWdsb2JhbAA6CoUMo32CawEBAQEJCwsHFAMigXIBAQUjFUEQCw4KAgIFIQICDwI4AQ0GDQEHAQEVh2OnDpFpgS+HHIIjgRYElHaFToxf X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.71,363,1320620400"; d="scan'208";a="135730214" Received: from msa05.smtpout.orange.fr (HELO msa.smtpout.orange.fr) ([193.252.23.214]) by mail1-smtp-roc.national.inria.fr with ESMTP; 16 Dec 2011 13:39:21 +0100 Received: from [192.168.1.105] ([83.199.22.116]) by mwinf5d17 with ME id 9ofJ1i0072WGtrF03ofJJC; Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:39:20 +0100 Message-ID: <4EEB3BF7.30401@frisch.fr> Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:39:19 +0100 From: Alain Frisch User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686 on x86_64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20111105 Thunderbird/8.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Gerd Stolpmann CC: Aleksey Nogin , caml-list@inria.fr References: <4EDE33A0.6070004@gmail.com> <1323760512.9833.9.camel@samsung> <4EE711FB.5020602@frisch.fr> <4EE83C26.7090108@frisch.fr> <1323867161.7750.27.camel@samsung> <4EE8DC93.1000806@metaprl.org> <1323884194.7750.58.camel@samsung> In-Reply-To: <1323884194.7750.58.camel@samsung> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Some comments on recent discussions On 12/14/2011 06:36 PM, Gerd Stolpmann wrote: > I know, and this makes me quite optimistic that it is not that hard to > develop standalone executables for the frequently used Unix utilities. It's amazing how a discussion about simplifying the life for Windows users ends up with "let's emulate Unix under Windows"! A few points: 1. It would be useful to have a completely standalone binary distribution of ocaml (with ocamlopt) under Windows. This can be achieved either with little development efforts by extracting the minimal needed subset of an mingw toolchain (an assembler, a linker, some libraries and object files to link the main program); or with a little bit more effort, by avoiding the need for an external toolchain altogether. I insist: most users of OCaml under Windows won't need a C compiler or Unix-like tools. 2. Binary packages for OCaml libraries could be simple .zip files to be extracted at a precise place (under the hierarchy created by the OCaml binary installer itself); or maybe even Windows installers. If installing a library only amounts to clicking on a link in a web page and run the installer, it already makes the life of the casual user much easier. We don't necessarily need a full-blown packaging system, with dependency tracking, versioning, automatic download, etc. 3. Binary packages are not created by casual users. It's not crazy to require, at least in the short term, a decent Unix-like environment (which includes a C compiler) in order to compile the libraries and create the binary packages. It would be nice to adapt all the OCaml libraries around so that they don't rely on external Unix tools, but this is simply not going to happen. 4. A small group of volunteers could identify the most important OCaml libraries around, make sure they compile fine under Windows, submit patches upstream if the build system needs to be adapted, and produce binary packages for these libraries. 5. What is important now is not to provide the ultimate package management system for OCaml under Windows. We should focus instead on lowering the barrier for casual users, addressing justified complaints from beginners, making it easy to use OCaml for simple native projects under Windows or for porting OCaml applications developed initially for Unix. My hope is that this will be enough to attract more "native" Windows users into OCaml, and then we (or they) can start thinking about more ambitious goals. -- Alain