Re: [Caml-list] If you distribute oasis' setup.ml with your software, please use a recent (>= 0.3.0) version of Oasis

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

Indeed. The recommendation is rather orthogonal to the choice of
maintainers to distribute setup.ml with they released tarball or not.
If they don't, fine, if they do, please distribute the setup.ml
generated from a recent OASIS.

As a downstream user, I would have a preference for people to generate
the setup.ml statically on their side (some less work and dependencies
for us users), but I understand that just tarballing the development
repository is a quick&easy way to push a release, made even easier by
github, so it's a reasonable choice -- and I understand that people
don't want to clutter their versioned repo with auto-generated files.

(The initial reason for my e-mail was benchmarking considerations:
we're considering using the OPAM compiler variant system to test
in-development branches of the OCaml compiler, which mean possibly
tight (edit, compile, opam install, benchmark) cycles. OPAM would be
used to install just what's needed for the benchmarks, so maybe one
library or two but mostly only the benchmarking library. In this
context, it's important to have as few dependencies as possible, and
I'm eager to remove the "oasis" dependency of "bench" and
"benchmark".)

On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 8:25 PM, Wojciech Meyer
<wojciech.meyer@gmail.com> wrote:
> One of the reasons why people don't regenerate setup.ml but rely on
> Oasis is very prosaic: some of the projects (if not most) are source
> hosted on github, but github does not host files, however git tags can be
> used to download the tarball using single URL.
>
> I'd add to Gabriel's suggestion to host these files somewhere, ocamlcore
> seems to be like a natural choice.
>
> Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> The number of packages available through OPAM that list "oasis" as a
>> dependency (see list below) is too high -- oasis being designed to let
>> developers pre-generate setup.ml to avoid any actual dependency on it.
>>
>> The reason for this is a glitch in old versions of Oasis (< 0.3.0)
>> that makes the generated setup.ml break with OCaml >= 4.00.0; OPAM
>> packagers list oasis as a dependency to regenerate a fixed setup.ml at
>> compilation time. This is the case in particular for the latest
>> versions of the following packages:
>> - ANSITerminal*
>> - bench*
>> - ocaml-expect
>> - ocaml-posix-resource
>> - ocaml-radixtree
>> - ocaml-sqlexpr
>> - optimization1d*
>> - root1d*
>>
>> (*): oasis is the only dependency besides the ubiquitous ocamlfind
>>
>> If you distribute setup.ml in your source releases, please make sure
>> that it is generated with a recent version of Oasis (>= 0.3.0). This
>> allows to remove oasis (and its four own dependencies) from the
>> dependencies of your package.
>>
>> You can check which version of Oasis a given setup.ml comes from with
>> the command:
>>   ocaml setup.ml -version
>>
>> If your package provides a setup.ml with version >= 0.3.0, and "oasis
>> setup" is still present in the "build" field of OPAM metadata
>> description (or "oasis" marked as a dependency for no other reason),
>> this is a packaging bug that you should report to the relevant package
>> maintainer or on the opam repository bugtracker (
>> https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam-repository/issues/ ).
>>
>> PS: I learned about the bad interaction between Oasis < 0.3.0 and
>> OCaml >= 4.00.0 from Anil Madhavapeddy in the following bugtracker
>> item: https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam-repository/issues/496
>
> --
> Wojciech Meyer
> http://danmey.org