Hello --

I have several ocamlbuild plugins that are very similar and I'm trying to
figure out how to refactor them. I pulled out a bunch of definitions into
another file (coq_paths.ml) and then said 'open Coq_paths' in '
myocamlbuild.ml'. But when I do this, ocamlbuild can no longer build the
plugin, not even if foo.cmo already exists in the _build directory.

After hacking on this for a long time (and digging through the ocamlbuild
sources) I found that you can write a Makefile that will build
myocamlbuild.cmo using ocamlbuild without a plugin, and then manually link
this against ocamlbuild.cmo and to produce a custom version of ocamlbuild
that uses the plugin (this is exactly what ocamlbuild does). My question
is: 'is there any nicer way to do this?' I'm including my Makefile below:

OCAMLBUILDDIR=$(shell ocamlfind query ocamlbuild)

all: _build/coq_builder
        @ ./_build/coq_builder -no-plugin coq.otarget

_build/coq_builder: myocamlbuild.ml coq_paths.ml
        @ echo "building builder...."
        @ ocamlbuild -cflags -I,`ocamlfind query ocamlbuild` -no-plugin
myocamlbuild.cmo
        @ ocamlc.opt unix.cma -I $(OCAMLBUILDDIR)
$(OCAMLBUILDDIR)/ocamlbuildlib.cma \
           _build/coq_paths.cmo _build/myocamlbuild.cmo \
           $(OCAMLBUILDDIR)/ocamlbuild.cmo -o _build/coq_builder
        @ echo "done"

clean:
        ocamlbuild -clean

Thanks in advance.

-- 
gregory malecha
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~gmalecha/