Re: [Caml-list] ocaml support in autotools

[Hendrik Tews <tews@cs.ru.nl>]

Guillaume Rousse <Guillaume.Rousse@inria.fr> writes:

   I'd like to have ocaml support in autotools (autoconf + automake), to
   avoid heavy code duplication between several projects (at least
   ocmalimages and activedvi).
   
I would very much like to see this. Please go ahead. I did some
autoconf hacking for the CCSL compiler, see the files aclocal.ml
and configure.ac in
http://wwwtcs.inf.tu-dresden.de/~tews/ccsl/viewcvs.cgi/Ccslc/
Feel free to reuse that code.

The main problem with autoconf from my point of view (at least in
2.57, the latest version I looked at) is that it provides a lot
of stuff, which is only relevant for C/C++ projects and which you
cannot easily disable. For instance the configure options
--includedir. Further, there is no way to add an additional
configure option. I have therefore overridden the internal macros
_AC_INIT_PARSE_ARGS and _AC_INIT_HELP in a private aclocal.m4.
However, now I have to adopt my changes to every new autoconf
version. Idially, there should be a simple way to disable each of
the standard configure options and to add new ones.

   http://www.lri.fr/~filliatr/ftp/ocaml/misc/configure.in

This version searches in the PATH, but sometimes the right ocaml
version is not in the path.

Bye,

Hendrik Tews