Note that opam in theory supports other solvers as listed at


https://opam.ocaml.org/doc/Specifying_Solver_Preferences.html#Yestherearedifferentversionsoftheuserpreferencelanguage

for example "packup" also gives good results and may be easier to build.

In practice, however, I think that most opam users choose aspcud (maybe
simply because the documentation recommends it) and I would not be
surprised if opam lost compatibility with other solvers at some point, for
example by making ascpud-specific assumption on the solver preference
language. But more people using other solvers can only improve the problem
-- and it may work already.

On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 5:26 PM, Ian Zimmerman <itz@buug.org> wrote:

> On 2016-07-12 15:01 -0400, Gabriel Scherer wrote:
>
> > > OTOH installing opam itself can be difficult because of its
> > > dependencies, mostly aspcud.
> > >
> > > I just switched to gentoo, and there it is pretty much impossible
> unless
> > > one's content with the internal solver.
>
> > Did you consider packaging aspcud for gentoo? Are there gentoo-specific
> > issues with that route?
>
> An aspcud package exists - that is not the problem.  The problem is its
> horribly long and tangled list of dependencies.  Which, unlike most
> distros, includes build-only dependencies, of course.  And which is
> almost guaranteed to conflict with some other package you need for an
> unrelated purpose.
>
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