Re: [Caml-list] We need a rich standard library distributed with OCaml, really

[Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 9:06 AM, Stéphane Glondu <steph@glondu.net> wrote:
> And "install OPAM first" is not a very satisfactory way of
> installing some software written in OCaml in a stable environment.

I wholly agree. My personal practice is to use OPAM to set up
*development* environment(s) for OCaml hacking, and rely on the system
package manager to install any end-user software (including those
written in OCaml). For example, I do not recommend installing Coq
through OPAM (unless one need experimental versions or plans to
contribute to Coq's development), but rather through the package
manager.

It remains, though, that we cannot assume that everyone is using a
distribution with a good OCaml packaging story (I know only of Fedora
and Debian although I haven't tried OSX distributions or the BSD ports
-- on other systems I've been a satisfied user of GODI for a while),
so for a long time the difficulty of *some* users and developers to
install OCaml (development) libraries effectively discouraged people
to rely on third-party libraries, and I think it is not the case
anymore.

I believe the Debian QA process is very useful and important. For
example, the handling of software license is still in its infancy in
OPAM, while there is a well-established checking process which is part
of Debian integration; I mentioned before that legal issues
discouraged some industrial users from using third-party libraries,
but I think reasonable users should feel rather safe using
Debian-packaged software.

The OCaml community also benefits from the fact that many consider
"supports all the official Debian packages" as a milestone (when
evaluating the readiness of a new hardware architecture for example),
and will thus foster development across all of the Debian user-space,
including packaged OCaml projects. More generally, we benefit from a
lot of patches and platform support developed by packagers for various
operating system (BSD port comes to mind), and this is part of the
continuing added value of packaging OCaml software for many systems.

On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 9:06 AM, Stéphane Glondu <steph@glondu.net> wrote:
> Le 27/08/2015 10:17, Gabriel Scherer a écrit :
>> Depending on external libraries used to be a problem when there was no
>> consensus on OCaml packaging (no longer than a few years ago people
>> where reluctant to even use ocamlfind). We now have a reasonable
>> consensus on a packaging story, and installing third-party libraries
>> has never been as easy as it is today -- except on Windows, meh.
>> I think you should embrace the idea of depending on software outside
>> the OCaml distribution.
>
> Depending on a multitude of external libraries makes packaging more
> difficult. I am talking about "system" packaging (deb, rpm...) here, not
> OPAM. And "install OPAM first" is not a very satisfactory way of
> installing some software written in OCaml in a stable environment.
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Stéphane