Re: [Caml-list] Issues with OCaml on Windows, MinGW build

[Dmitry Grebeniuk <gdsfh1@gmail.com>]

Hello.

>  - You can't login to the MinGW shell to allow remote builds via ssh.
> I can get most of the
> required functionality by setting environment variables and calling
> the MinGW's sh.exe
> explicitly, but it would be useful to have instructions on how this should go.

  To allow remote builds via ssh, you should install sshd server.
Another option is to use some kind of "continuous integration
system" which will regularly check your source code repository
and build binaries automatically.

>  - When trying to build some standard OCaml packages, like cryptokit
> and oUnit, the 'configure'
> and 'make' steps fail badly. One reason is that 'configure' invokes an
> OCaml program which calls
> Sys.command, and on my computer, some of the arguments are filenames
> with spaces in them.

  Unix scripts are too sure that there are no spaces in paths,
it's easier to install everything in the path without spaces.
(I've tried to fight this issue, but our forces were too inequal.)

  btw, why didn't you took overbld package, which has
OCaml/mingw, cryptokit and oUnit already compiled?  Here is
the list of all "packages" in overbld distribution:
http://overbld.hg.sourceforge.net/hgweb/overbld/overbld/file/tip/src

> Has anyone had success building standard packages using the MinGW distribution?

  I had such success, but I didn't want to compile everything
manually every time the new version is released or some bug
is found and should be fixed as soon as possible (i.e. by me,
by writing and applying patch locally), so I wrote some dumb
scripts that can apply patches, compile, install "packages",
taking into account their internal dependencies.