Re: Solved! ... Re: [Caml-list] Building findlib/OCamlfind on Win32 system

[Yutaka OIWA <oiwa@yl.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp>]

>> On Tue, 11 May 2004 01:42:09 +0800, brian donovan <lists@lophty.com> said:

brian> With the patch from Eugene Kotlyarov and following his advice, I was 
brian> able to get the most recent version of findlib working with OCaml 
brian> 3.0.7.  That's solved my problems for now, but I urge you to share the 
brian> frontend.ml.ocaml307.patch with Gerd Stolpmann (email 
brian> <gerd(at)gerd-stolpmann.de>).  Undoubtedly, there will be someone at 
brian> some point who's trying to get OCaml 3.0.6 working with findlib 0.8.1 
brian> and your work may be a lifeline for them.  If I hadn't seen on Gerd's 
brian> site that someone (you) had gotten a version of findlib working on 
brian> Win32, I might not have pursued the matter as far as I did and may never 
brian> have gotten this sorted out.

I'm glad to hear you have solved the problem.


In depth, my patch to the findlib 0.8.1 has three (almost) independent
functionality:

 1) To allow spaces in names of install directories
       (patch to configure script)
 2) To allow spaces in command line invoked by ocamlfind
       (patch to a ML source file)
 3) To convert /cygdrive/... style pathname back to c:\ style,
    and some other issues with cygwin commands
       (patch to configure script)

So, as long as you use the path-name with no spaces (like "c:\ocaml3.0.7"),
You only need functionality 3), which is almost same as one suggested by
Eugene Kotlyarov.

# I have installed OCaml/mingw to "C:\Program Files\Objective Caml", so
# I needed functionalities 1) and 2).

The issue 1) is (to some extent) common in Unix environment: adding
many double-quotes carefully into configure script might be a good thing
to do; I will consider sending this part of fix to Gerd Stolpmann.
On the other hand, the issue 2) is specific to mingw environment: in
some place between the OCaml standard library and Windows cmd.exe (?),
double quotes are parsed twice and a space in the name of install path
becomes a word-splitter. I'm not sure whether this is a OCaml's bug or
not (just a spec), and also not sure whether this is fixed.
I have not dug this issue deeply and just patched findlib as a workaround.

I'm happy if this information helps someone in the future...

-- 
Yutaka Oiwa              Yonezawa Lab., Dept. of Computer Science,
      Graduate School of Information Sci. & Tech., Univ. of Tokyo.
                    <oiwa@yl.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp>, <yutaka@oiwa.jp>
PGP fingerprint = C9 8D 5C B8 86 ED D8 07  EA 59 34 D8 F4 65 53 61

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