[Caml-list] how could the community help with Oasis-DB; towards a CPAN for OCaml?

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

Edgar, It's excellent to know that you have some knowledge of Oasis-DB.

I share the common assumption that this is one of the missing bricks
of the OCaml ecosystem, and I hope the community at large can help
with it. I asked Sylvain about it a few months ago, but he wasn't sure
at that time what was the best way to help. With him now having less
time available, I was afraid things could stall on that front.

Could you (or Sylvain) make a more precise picture of how exactly the
community could help in the Oasis-DB effort?

Is the priority to upload package (then maybe the warning on the
webpage advising not to do it seriously should be changed), or are
there other things we could help with, for example development
aspects? Who/where should we ask for advice/help when we have issues?

A few months ago we tried to organize an "OCaml packaging sprint", in
which in particular Hezekiah M. Carty was of great help. Do you think
we could restart a similar effort in the short future?

It would really help, I think, if:
- there was a list somewhere of things other people can contribute
- you talked more about the progress of the effort (I discovered
'odb.ml' by absolute chance a few weeks ago, while I follow almost all
OCaml-related information channels); if people don't know about your
work, they won't contribute

On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 10:01 PM, Edgar Friendly <thelema314@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/10/2011 03:32 PM, Andrei Formiga wrote:
>>
>> The question is: what should be done? What must be done to enable
>> OASIS-DB?
>
>
> Sylvain has worked with me to enable auto-installation of oasis-db packages
> via odb[2].  There's not a large repo of packages[1], but most of it is
> auto-installable (run odb to get a list), as long as you have ocaml and
> findlib to start from.  The dependencies are automatically handled and
> installed from source.  I even have confirmation that it works under
> windows, although it definitely needs cygwin there.
>
> The repo could use some love with people uploading[3] new packages to it.
>  Just provide a tarball and optionally a link to the tarball on some other
> website.  Oasis dependencies are detected automatically, packages w/o an
> _oasis file need to have deps specified manually.  Odb is able to install
> findlib-enabled projects that use ([./configure &&] make && make install),
> (omake && omake install) and oasis' setup.ml for building. This last option
> is able to execute whatever sequence of configure, make and install commands
> are needed for your project, without replacing the current infrastructure.
>
> Files uploaded to the repo are available with odb --unstable, they have to
> be manually approved to become part of the default --testing.  I hope that
> in time, the --stable option can become default.  Odb also installs by
> default to ~/.odb/lib.  --sudo tells it to use sudo for global install,
> --have-perms tells it to install to the global repo without sudo.  If anyone
> wants to auto-detect permissions on the ocamlfind global, we can get rid of
> --have-perms.
>
> I'm on #ocaml most of the time, and will get back to you if I'm away. Tell
> me how things work or don't.
>
> E.
>
> [1] http://oasis.ocamlcore.org/dev/browse
> [2] http://github.com/thelema/odb
> [3] http://oasis.ocamlcore.org/dev/upload
>
>
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