RE: [Caml-list] Development status of the dependency generator for OCaml

[David Allsopp <dra-news@metastack.com>]

Markus Elfring wrote:
> > What are you regarding as erroneous about the entries with "only a
> > dependency on a single compiled module interface"
> > (for bytecode, that sounds correct to me).
> 
> A software build system which can support the programming language “OCaml”
> to some some degree will contain generation rules for involved file types
> as you mentioned it also.

I'm not clear how what you say relates to my question about what you were finding erroneous.

> > You mean that you'd like simple cases eliminated?
> 
> Yes. - The provided data set should eventually not repeat specifications
> for dependencies for which you care by the selected build system already.

How is ocamldep supposed to know what you care and don't care about?

> > foo.cmi:
> > foo.cmo: foo.cmi
> >
> > should simply not be printed, and be assumed to work with implicit
> rules?
> 
> Yes. - In principle for the default data export variant.

I imagine not printing targets which have no dependencies would not do any harm per se, but these are generated files and in other respects the absence of an entry for foo.cmi could potentially be more confusing when debugging as it might imply that ocamldep had not scanned that file. For the second example, the default is very clearly not going to change (since ocamldep already exists). Personally, I'd find it very irritating to have to remember to add %.cmo: %.cmi to my Makefiles (I'd already be irritated, as it would imply I was not using jbuilder, but that's a separate story...) 

> I looked into a few OCaml build configurations where the desired
> dependency handling seems to work better with explicit make rules and
> corresponding automatic rule generation.

What works better and in which configurations?


David