Re: [ANN] OCaml Batteries Included, alpha 3

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

On 07-02-2009, Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
> On Saturday 07 February 2009 14:43:49 Sylvain Le Gall wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> On 07-02-2009, Mikkel Fahnøe Jørgensen <mikkel@dvide.com> wrote:
>> > So in conclusion, Batteries is a very important contribution but we
>> > must also improve on the tool chains and build environment.
>> > ocamlbuild, flexdll, cross platform findlib and ocamlmklib are all
>> > steps in the right direction.
>>
>> - ocamlbuild works on windows and linux
>> - findlib works on windows and linux
>>
>> (however you need some tools from cygwin in some case like for building
>> findlib)
>>
>> flexdll is not required directly (i think you don't need to invoke it
>> directly) and ocamlmklib can be replaced by ocamlbuild.
>>
>> Building ocaml itself is still complicated on Windows (but not that much
>> once you know how to do it), but I don't think you can easily address
>> this problem in any way.
>>
>> So: what need to be improved?
>
> Documentation! I tried to use ocamlbuild several times and gave up because I 
> could not figure out how to do simple things.
>

Good point indeed. 

> I used Makefiles for a bit but make/ocamldep is so fragile that it broke so 
> often I ended up doing "make clean; make" to rebuild at every edit. So now my 
> method of choice is either writing the compile line out by hand every time or 
> using a bash script that always recompiles everything.
>

Same with OCamlMakefile which doesn't detect library update (even in the
same source tree). This problem disappear with ocamlbuild which is a
good tool for this. More documentation would allow more people to
use it and to improve it.

Regards,
Sylvain Le Gall