Original bug ID: 2500
Reporter: administrator
Status: closed
Resolution: fixed
Priority: normal
Severity: feature
Category: ~DO NOT USE (was: OCaml general)

Bug description

Full_Name: Gerd Stolpmann
Version: 3.07pl2
OS: All
Submission from: p508170d8.dip0.t-ipconnect.de (80.129.112.216)

Hello cathedral,

as a pragmatic solution to the problem that -pack does not work for every
platform, I have the following suggestion: Currently, the symbols are renamed
after machine-code generation, and this is why objcopy is needed. To work around
this, I suggest to rename the symbols before machine-code generation. This
does not need any further tools.

ocamlopt could be called as follows:

ocamlopt -c module.ml -for-pack

This would already generate a module.o where the symbols are renamed. In
module.cmx, a special flag would be included indicating that this happened.
Later, when

ocamlopt -pack ...

is called, only these specially prepared modules are accepted. Conversely, it is
forbidden to use these modules for anything else.

I hope that this change helps that -pack is widely adopted. I don't see any
other way to handle name clashes in an intelligent way. You know that there are
some library authors who are unwilling to rename their modules (i.e. the
cooperative social solution), and I also think it is not the task of O'Caml
distributions to make pressure on the authors in this respect. All other
solutions to the problem are somehow dumb, e.g. a registry of module names, or
something like this.

In the hope the cathedral understands what is going on on the bazaar,

Gerd Stolpmann