Re: [Caml-list] [ANN] drom.0.2.0: OCaml Project Manager, beta release

[Fabrice Le Fessant <Fabrice.Le_fessant@inria.fr>]

Hi François,

On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 2:22 PM François Bobot <francois.bobot@cea.fr> wrote:
> I'm very happy to see work in the OCaml world in that direction. I was currently looking for
> duniverse for that kind of need. Do they fullfil different needs or how do they compare?

My understanding is that `duniverse` tackles the problem of the
"mono-repo", i.e. when you want to manage many different projects as
just one project, using `dune` capacity to build them all at once. I
would say that `drom` tackles an orthogonal problem, which is to
simplify the creation of simple OCaml projects (generating all the
standard files you need, like Makefile, dune-project, dune,
.ocamlformat, .github CI, documentation, license, etc.) and day-to-day
management (changing dependencies, having a copy of headers that you
can insert in new files, etc.). It also provides a single interface
over basic opam/dune commands.

It would probably be possible to use `duninverse` on a set of projects
containing projects generated by `dune`, but I don't know enough about
`duniverse` to be sure.

Of course, `drom` can manage projects composed of multiple libraries
and executables (called `packages` because `drom` generates one `opam`
file for every one of them), but I wouldn't call that a mono-repo,
it's just frequent to have more than one package in a small project.
--
Fabrice