> Xavier Leroy wrote :
>
> Again, I don't have anything against binary distributions, as long as
> there's an underlying source distribution and recompilation manager
> that lets me bring things up to date if a binary incompatibility
> arises.  RPMs get close to this but lack a "rebuild and install what
> needs to be recompiled" command.  Maybe Debian's packages or BSD ports
> are better in this respect.

Are you expecting all the OCaml developpers to distribute full source code
with each of the binary distribution they're making ? That's perhaps
realistic from a Linux/FSF point of view, but not from a Windows one.... To
enable the widespread of such a good language, the dev community needs solid
and useful libraries to build up a complete dev environment - including DB
access, Network , mathematics, drawing, etc... This work has already start
but some won't release their sources because they're in businness or because
sources are not "clean" enough and releasing them in a proper way would cost
a lot of time (and money)... or many many many reasons which have made lots
of commonly C/C++ used libraries been closed source.

I have worked a lot with Dynlink, and currently the main lack is to enable
"dynamic-link at load-time". That is, adding a keyword ( you're writing for
example "external" instead of "open" ) and then ocamlrun will load the CMA
at startup, check the interface, and do the linking.

If you combine such a feature with the ability to check only the equality
between the sub-interface of the module your program is using , then you're
not breaking type-safe at all, and you allow binary-only-distribution.

With a little bit of versionning, that'll be perfect :)

Nicolas Cannasse
the only window ocaml user (?) :-)

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