Re: [Caml-list] Re: oasis & macosx

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

Sylvain,

Read that message after your vacations.

> - the documentation can be confusing, because I have written it and I
>  probably know the system too much, ideally someone with no prior
>  knowledge should review it to make it understandable by an oasis
>  beginner (help are welcome on this point)

I don't think that's a good idea. You built that system, you are the
one who knows it best and if you don't know how to explain it to
others we have a problem.

Unless I'm mistaken, at the moment there's no documentation about
oasis-db. There's this page :

http://oasis.forge.ocamlcore.org/oasis-db.html

and from this page the various links keep going back to documentation
about oasis (which is certainly why I got confused in the first
place). Nowhere is the general architecture of this system explained
to me. Nowhere is it written that findlib is used to install things
and where and how it uses findlib to installs things.

Maybe one problem is that the work around oasis seems to be thought in
terms of features and interoperability with other systems. None of
which are really essential to me. Personally my needs are pretty basic
*which doesn't mean they are easy to solve*. I want cabal install (and
uninstall) for ocaml both as a user and as a package publisher.

My opinion is that the system should be thought in terms of *experience*.

From the user perspective the experience I personally would like is :

1) Find a way to install the ocaml compilers
2) Download the oasis sources, compile them (don't ask me to install
other things).
3) You can now oasis install/uninstall the packages that are uploaded
in oasis-db

From the publisher perspective the experience looks right to me,
provide an _oasis file in your tarball, upload it on oasis-db. That's
it, your package is now installable with oasis.

 > - there should be a binary installer for easy install on MacOS X, but
>  until recently I don't have a Mac at hand to do it. This is now fixed
>  but I don't manage to have the time to learn how to make a package on
>  MacOS X

I don't think time should be lost on providing binary installers for
various platforms, this doesn't scale. Time should be spent on trying
to make oasis able to bootstrap itself based on the existence of an
ocaml install. This scales and makes oasis easy to install on every
platform where it will be needed.

Best,

Daniel