Re: Cherry-picking modules (was Re: [ANN] OCaml Reins 0.1 - Persistent Data Structure Library)

[Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain@le-gall.net>]

On 26-09-2007, Vincent Aravantinos <vincent.aravantinos@yahoo.fr> wrote:
> Ok, there is camlget, ok there is ocamlfind, ok there is godi.
>
> Maybe if there were some 'Inria'-made tool (seems camlget is starting  
> point for that ?) that be settled in the standard ocaml distribution  
> would help to make everyone agreed, don't you think ? This does not  
> solve intrinsic problems such as "I prefer dynamically linked" vs "I  
> prefer statically linked" but at least that would be a tool everyone  
> could rely on. Then everyone is free to use it or not. It would even  
> simplify the task for library-writers.
>

ocamlfind and godi are very good tool on their own. Why do they need to
be INRIA-made tool ?

INRIA made very good compiler. Great! But let other people use this
language to build other tools -- with different idea than INRIA. 

> BTW isn't it the same with ocamlbuild ? Before there were Omake and  
> others. Now it seems to settle some kind of standard.
>

FYI, i really think having ocamlbuild in ocaml is not a good solution
(as bad as having LablTk). For ages, there was ocamlmakefile -- coming
from INRIA. This was widely used but doesn't become a standard -- there
is no need for it. Anyone, can choose to use his/her/anyone own build
system.

It is really strange, everyone seems to look at OCaml as "languages for
kid" with everything bundle into some kind of nice package... Please be
more realistic, OCaml is a complicated language -- design for
"discriminative hackers". There is a great shift between end-user and
developper (as M. Furr explains). If you want to deliver something
without dependency, you just have to precompile things, tar gzip it in a
nice shell script ".run" and made it available. This will be easy for
end-user. For developpers, compiling their own OCaml program, dealing
with library dependency should be easy !

Regards,
Sylvain Le Gall