Re: [Caml-list] Build-/Installation-Tools - not enogh of them?

[Jaap Boender <jaapb@kerguelen.org>]

On 26/11/2018 10:14, Oliver Bandel wrote:
> The situation differs, if one wants to package the written software,
> and one needs to know many of those tools, just to compile the stuff.
> So, when one just wants to compile and install some software,
> just for that, it would take much effort to learn the different build-tools.

I'd like to chime in here - as the person responsible for doing most of 
the OCaml packaging for pkgsrc, I've noticed that I can hardly ever just 
update a package to a new version anymore - I'll generally also need to 
update the infrastructure as some sort of new build tool will have 
become involved, with all its attendant quirks, or someone will have 
decided to change the name of packages, or some other change will have 
occurred. Things seem to be in a constant state of flux, and thus 
packaging becomes quite time-consuming.

Bootstrapping is also a problem: I don't know if the problem has been 
solved in the meantime, but not too long ago it was impossible to 
package opam, because some of the libraries needed to build opam 
actually used the opam installer themselves. I had to write my own 
version of the opam installer to get around that particular problem.

It's all well and good to say that 'using opam is the default', but can 
we please spare a thought for distribution editors as well? Using ocaml 
and friends with the package manager that comes with your distribution 
is a reasonable use case, I'd think.

best

   Jaap

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