I've used oasis for small experiments, and I hope this project will gain traction.

I found it perhaps still a bit rough on the dev. side : it's heavier than just writing a simple META file, but the benefits are important (in particular, you can avoid autoconf but still be more flexible than a simple Makefile-only build system), and it's particularly sweet on the user side.

I'm not convinced with the linux-installer.bin you distribute, and prefer to build from source. oasis built flawlessly, but I first had to find the various dependencies; in particular, the oUnit version required is newer than the package available in either Godi or  Debian, and your small dependencies (odn, ocamlify...) cannot be found elsewhere. They're very easy to build (thanks to... oasis), but the whole search-on-ocamlforge process is perhaps unnecessary.

Could you provide an archive included the source of all those dependencies that are not in both Debian (testing) and GODI ?

I'm currently using debian testing, and have needed the following files :

- ocaml-data-notation-0.0.3.tar.gz

- ocaml-expect-0.0.2.tar.gz

- ocamlify-0.0.1.tar.gz

- ounit-1.1.0.tar.gz

(Of course, Oasis-DB will make all that a breeze ;-)

It's a triviality to say but I'm quite happy with the change in command-line invocation style (OASIS -setup => oasis setup). Four small comments regarding this :

- when just typing "oasis", it would be nicer to directly give the help page; darcs and git, for example, have this behavior that I find handy

- the small message we currently have says "[..] call 'oasis -help' for help". Wouldn't it be more consistent to "call 'oasis help'" ? I can see that you kept the -help/--help interface for compatibility with other command-line tools, but the subcommand-style is more consistent with the rest of the interface

- git and darcs automatically call a pager when producing long text output; it would also be a nice thing to have in oasis, especially for the "oasis manual" 

- the current behavior of subcommand help ("oasis help query") output first the general help, then the subcommand-specific help; I think just the subcommand-specific help would be a better output

Thanks for the work !