From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id TAA05264; Thu, 23 Aug 2001 19:37:51 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id TAA05287 for ; Thu, 23 Aug 2001 19:37:50 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from nef.ens.fr (nef.ens.fr [129.199.96.32]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id f7NHbnX03272 for ; Thu, 23 Aug 2001 19:37:49 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from clipper.ens.fr (clipper-gw.ens.fr [129.199.1.22]) by nef.ens.fr (8.10.1/1.01.28121999) with ESMTP id f7NHbnm56736 for ; Thu, 23 Aug 2001 19:37:49 +0200 (CEST) Received: from localhost (frisch@localhost) by clipper.ens.fr (8.9.2/jb-1.1) id TAA09757 for ; Thu, 23 Aug 2001 19:37:49 +0200 (MET DST) Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 19:37:49 +0200 (MET DST) From: Alain Frisch To: Caml list Subject: [Caml-list] Libraries in the distribution Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk Hello, there seems to be a consensus that the Str library should be replaced with Pcre in the standard distribution. I guess that nobody is satisfied with Str, and that it is kept in the distribution for backward compatibility. There are currently several levels of "official recognition" for libraries: - standard library: more or less what is needed to build OCaml - OCaml distribution: useful libraries from the Caml team - CDK: useful 3rd party libraries - bazar-ocaml: less general or less finished libraries from the Caml team (?) - other 3rd party libraries There is also the Debian effort to package OCaml libraries. In order to add to the confusion: - the status of the CDK is not really clear; is it an experiment ? will there be a way for library authors to upgrade their libraries themselves in the CDK ? will there be official guidelines for a "standard structure for packages" ? - some libraries in the standard distribution seems really integrated with OCaml (bigarray, dynlink, threads), some are almost unavoidable (Unix), some have 3rd party (or not) counterpart which are generally considered superior (Str, labltk ?). - for newcomers, it is not necessarily easy to use libraries that requires custom runtime environement/toplevel (the good news is that it seems that there will soon be a support for dynamically loading library in the runtime environnement). I don't want to speak for the Caml team, but I'm not sure to see how a 3rd party library could be included in the standard distribution. The OCaml distribution follows OCaml releases (of course !), and the author of the library may want to release more often. Recall that OCaml development does not follow the bazar model (?); including 3rd party packages is not the best way to keep control of the development of the language. I think it is best to keep the OCaml distribution as small as possible, and to facilitate the installation of other packages. The current CDK approach seems a bit unrealistic to me: will a few people take in charge the integration of all 3rd party packages ? Something like CPAN seems more promising. (I don't see how it could work without the support or at least an initial impulsion from the Caml team, but they have probably more interesting things to do. Maybe if would be in the interest of the Caml Consortium to coordinate 3rd party efforts; is the status of the Consortium a public information ?) Beside a small standard distribution and easy to install packages, there could be more complete distributions (something like the current CDK), not necessarily maintained by the Caml team. Just my .02 EUR. Alain Frisch ------------------- Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr