Re: [Caml-list] Library installation procedure (for use with OPAM)?

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

Le lundi, 9 décembre 2013 à 17:39, Sebastien Mondet a écrit :
> So, if everybody else have to implement them, opam's install files become a new standard for the OCaml cummunity?  

Frankly besides maybe wodi on windows I'm not so sure I see something reasonably competing with opam at that point, so that "everybody" may not include a lot of persons. Personally I don't have time to care for alternatives and I do what minimizes my admin/maintenance time at most.
  
> Do most of us agree? (I'm not against it, I just don't want to rely on 50 different standards).

I don't think it's a question of agreeing, usage will tell. Besides I don't see another standard, maybe `ocamlfind install` but it's limited in what it can install (and I hope that eventually the annoying two-headed structure ocamlfind/opam will disapear, e.g. the notion of ocamlfind package could be merged in the compiler).
  
> (BTW, since you generate those .install files you could have generated install.sh (http://install.sh) files doing the 'cp's as easily ;) )

Sure but that's one more thing to maintain across all my packages. Besides I hope that eventually a good build tool will emerge for OCaml and can generate these .install files for me, I'm still not fond of having to maintain and copy this pkg-builder script across all my packages.  
  
> (a few times a `cp exec $BIN` is also needed indeed).

About half of my packages do that. Besides since with package managers we no longer see the tarballs I think it's a good practice to at least install the CHANGES, README and the sample code in the doc directory of a package.

> (A while ago, before opam, a new version of GODI broke on our main platform because of some ocamlnet configuration bug, but I was able to reinstall ocaml and about 25 third-party libraries and syntax extensions from scratch without too much pain → we see great value in that package-management independence)
Why not. I guess you can see the value of having each of these libraries generating a .install file that you can process with a simple command line tool rather than have to deal with the idiosyncrasies of each custom (usually semi-broken) install procedure.

Best,

Daniel