Re: [Caml-list] New version of the binary installer for Windows

[Jonathan Protzenko <jonathan.protzenko@gmail.com>]

Hey,
> How about bundling the installer with cygwin or msys? Beware of the
> license issues however.
Well that's the usual debate : should the installer provide an entire 
environment (e.g. msys + the right compilers), so that users can fire up 
an "ocaml shell" and get all the good features (odb, native compilation, 
etc.)? Or should the installer rather provide the basics only, and let 
users pick msys or cygwin later on if they wish to do more advanced stuff?

With this release, I'm going with the minimalistic approach: the 
installer provides just enough to do bytecode, and users are free to 
install whatever environment they like if they wish to do native 
compilation.

The rationale is as follows: if the user is an advanced user, they 
probably have developer tools set up already, so I don't see much point 
in providing them with another standalone environment that would 
potentially conflict with theirs.

If a user wants to do advanced stuff (besides playing with the toplevel 
and bytecode compilation in emacs), they can simply install cygwin + the 
mingw-w64 compilers, and they're good to go. It really is a few clicks 
to perform, and I'm not sure I can have the installer do that for them.

I'm open to more arguments, though. There still is the option of 
prompting the user about whether they want to install msys + mingw-w64 
during the install phase (I'm saying msys here because it's more 
lightweight than cygwin, and easier to unzip as a whole). The installer 
could then download the latest release, and unzip it alongside the OCaml 
binaries, so that everything comes bundled together. That may be an 
interesting solution, but bug 5465 is a showstopper, and of course it's 
much more work :)

Cheers,

jonathan
>
> Cheers,
>
> Wojciech