On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

> 1) does we really need such a feature, aren't distribution born for such
>    issues? (obviously I'm thinking about the Linux world here)

Well, Linux is not the center of the world (even of the Unix-world). There
are several OS, several distributions, and you're not always sys admin on
the system you're working on (or don't want to use root priveleges to
install an ocaml package).


> 2) if we really need such a feature (for example just to have
>    transparent access to packages between different linux distributions
>    or between linux and windows and mac and ... worlds) who is
>    responsible to keep an archive of available package gettable via
>    ocamlfind or whatevere else?
>    CPAN, APT, and other approaches work because someon set up an
>    official or de-facto-official archive (Well, APT also support other
>    repositories, but official one are the most used and trusted ...).

What about a Central OCaml Archive (with a nice acronym; or simply a
centralized list of URLs) and some conventions about namespaces ?

If it is impossible to manage such a central repository, an intermediate
solution would be to provide explicitly URLs for findlib-dependencies.

> 3) ocaml packages are usually distributed as source packages and we have
>    not a standardized way to build and install them, the success of
>    CPAN, APT, are due to the facts that _or_ the distribution is in
>    binary form with standardadized file system sructure _or_ the
>    distribution is in source form with standardized compilation and
>    installation procedure

A standardized compilation and installation procedure would be great,
indeed.

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