[Caml-list] Re: ~/.opam design

[Florent Monnier <monnier.florent@gmail.com>]

2013/05/29, Mr. Herr wrote:
[...]
> There are certainly advantages in the ~/.opam design decision, but I have
> yet to find out how to roll out my ~/.opam libraries for production.

I do like this design. It's very logic.
Install in the user's home is just the default behaviour.
Moreover if you want to install in the system you should login as
root, then just change the defaults for the root user to install in
the system.

For fun I've played with wrapping an opam package inside a rpm package.
I just have to tar.gz the package directory and in the .spec file, sed
the archive field for a file:// path (because not allowed to get
something from outside) seded with the archives in the SOURCES
directory of the rpm package. I init Opam and repo remove the internet
one (again nothing from outside), then install in the path that
rpmbuild wants.
There is still one detail that won't be able to be done by a script
it's when there's a C lib dependency, because Opam don't provide yet
any feature for this. But this will probably come for 2.0. So it's
potentially possible to create .rpm's for all Opam packages with
almost no or very few human work. This kind of rpm's won't fit the
Mageia packaging policy though, but we could change it to allow this,
or put an unofficial rpm repo somewhere else.

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