Re: [Caml-list] One build system to rule them all?

[Sebastien Mondet <sebastien.mondet@gmail.com>]

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On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 3:16 PM, Peter Zotov <whitequark@whitequark.org>
wrote:

> On 2014-09-10 22:59, Yotam Barnoy wrote:
>
>> ocp-build actually looks very interesting. The manual (which is here:
>> http://github.com/OCamlPro/ocp-build/blob/master/docs/
>> user-manual/user-manual.pdf?raw=true
>> [2]) is incomplete, but contains a nice survey of the existing build
>> tools, and motivation for making ocp-build. Has anyone had experience
>> with ocp-build? Opam seems to be using it, but they also use a
>> makefile (why?) with a bunch of shell commands inside (which is
>> precisely the problem from my perspective). ocp-build is supposedly
>> compatible with Windows, too.
>>
>
> Every single time I had to use ocp-build, it broke in an odd and hard to
> fix way. It was so bad that eventually I just ported the ocp-build-using
> projects (ocp-index and its dependencies) to OASIS. Most worryingly it has
> some strange requirement to ship bytecode, which ties it to a released
> OCaml
> version; no other buildsystem needs that.
>
>
Yes ocp-build is broken for many corner cases, I've been trying to push it
to its maximum; look at that ugly shell script:
https://github.com/hammerlab/ketrew/blob/master/please.sh that even has to
create a yojson library out of the one in ~/.opam to please ocp-build's
assumptions.

Also, like every build system based on flat files (oasis, obuild), it is
fundamentally broken. You'll always need a programming language to extended
your build (adding targets, like build documentation/websites, special
tests, .merlin files, code generation...).

- omake did that with yet another obscure and weird language (I guess the
goal was to "look" like `make` but with even more broken string escaping).
- ocamlbuild and jenga picked the right language.
    - ocamlbuild's API is very limited, there is not even a clear way to
replace all the crazy small files required everywhere (_tags, mllib, ...)
with function calls within a myocamlbuild.ml plugin. It is also painfully
slow.
    - Jenga is not for "normal" projects. It takes half-an-hour to build
jenga itself, and it's dependency tree is not very portable. The API is
very convoluted even for simple projects.

Look at https://github.com/samoht/assemblage/ certainly going to in the
right direction.






> --
> Peter Zotov
>
>
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