[Caml-list] [ANN] yypkg: cross-platform package manager, and build scripts for windows

[Adrien <camaradetux@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I am pleased to announce the first public release of yypkg (Yellow
Yeti Pkg), a fast, cross-platform package manager (yes, this includes
windows).

I am also pleased to announce the "mingw-builds" project, a port of
the Slackware Linux build scripts (shell scripts) to allow
cross-compilation to mingw(-w64) (gcc on windows).

The most notable features of yypkg are portability, the ability to
install anywhere in the filesystem hierarchy and the edition of
libtool (.la) and pkg-config (.pc) files to make packages relocatable.

Currently, all the packages are made with the mingw-builds. The list
currently is: atk, cairo, expat, gdk-pixbuf, gettext, glib2, gtk+2,
iconv, libjpeg, libpng, libtiff, pango, pcre, pixman, wget and zlib.
All are 32bit libraries.
There are no ocaml packages currently unfortunately.

The corresponding triplet for these libraries is i686-w64-mingw32 and
probably requires some explanations: "mingw32" doesn't imply 32bit and
"w64" doesn't imply 64bit.
The "32" from "mingw32" doesn't matter and "w64" means the toolchain
has some features that have been brought by the mingw-w64 project as
opposed to the mingw.org project.
Only the first component matters for the bitness but do it's better
not to mix packages with different triplets.


And one warning: the packages aren't currently perfect. There are
known issues and one in libgthread in particular.
They're in beta but you can definitely try yypkg, help test, and
complain about all the missing and broken features. ;-)


You can get in touch through IRC:
  * on irc.freenode.net: #yypkg, #ocaml, #ocaml-fr
  * on irc.oftc.net: #mingw-w64


Homepage: http://yypkg.forge.ocamlcore.org/
Introduction tutorial: http://yypkg.forge.ocamlcore.org/tutorial/tutorial.html
Screenshots: http://yypkg.forge.ocamlcore.org/screenshots/index.html
Downloads: http://forge.ocamlcore.org/project/showfiles.php?group_id=145

mingw-builds' gitweb: http://gitweb.notk.org/
example build script:
http://gitweb.notk.org/?p=slackware64-current.git;a=blob;f=slackware64-current/source/l/atk/atk.SlackBuild;hb=HEAD

PS: Dependencies are: sexplib, fileutils, bsdtar with xz-support,
wget, and lablgtk2 for the gui.

PS: If you're wondering why not port apt/dpkg or rpm, compare writing
ocaml to porting decade-old C (perl, sh, ...) code to a completely
different platform.
And the packages wouldn't magically become available.

PS: But you can find good packages for cross-compilation to windows in
fedora and opensuse, I think debian is a bit lagging but there is an
effort.
That doesn't really help other distributions and windows itself however.

--

Adrien Nader