Re: [Caml-list] Preferred layout for new packages

[Martin Jambon <martin.jambon@ens-lyon.org>]

My current, personal preferences are the following:

Use for in-house development:
- omake
- batteries (some of it)

Avoid in new projects:
- camlp4/camlp5
- ocamlbuild

I'm glad for the many libraries and tools written by the community. 
They are all fine as long as they work and are:
- maintained, unlikely to break anytime soon or easy to take over or 
replace;
- not invasive.

Martin

On Wed 14 Nov 2012 09:00:12 AM PST, Marek Kubica wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Nov 2012 09:42:09 -0500
> Edgar Friendly <thelema314@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The community is trying to standardize on Oasis, which generates
>> ocamlbuild-based build systems.  In the future, this may generate
>> some other build system if a better one comes out.
>
> So OASIS it is. Fine.
>
>>> 2. Unit tests: I used OUnit which was okay, but maybe there are
>>> better solutions? I've seen that there is Kaputt and I have seen
>>> that there is https://github.com/camlunity/ocaml-quickcheck as well
>>> as https://github.com/vincent-hugot/iTeML which was extracted from
>>> batteries recently.
>> iTeML is more of a test extraction framework, and builds on top of
>> OUnit and a hacked version of the Jane St. quickcheck library.  It
>> can easily support other frameworks, and it would be interesting to
>> explore a custom framework designed with iTeML in mind.
>
> I actually like test extraction frameworks, tools like nose and py.test
> have made writing tests with Python much nicer, that's why I'm somehow
> unimpressed how verbose OUnit is. But having the test code in a comment
> seems ugly to me. Maybe there could be some CamlP4 hack to exclude it
> on normal compilation?
>
>>> 3. Stdlib: I don't mind depending on batteries and/or core, are
>>> there any reasons against? Especially in the unit tests it drove me
>>> nuts that I wasn't able to display results without writing
>>> printers, and I know batteries has at least a generic printer.
>> Batteries' dump function is a terrible printer for anything beyond
>> the most basic of purposes, just as the Pervasives.compare is also
>> terrible.  Batteries' printer combinators (`List.print Int.print
>> stdout [1;2;3]`) are what I use for most purposes.
>
> That's a great hint, thanks!
>
> regards,
> Marek
>