On Mon, Oct 14, 2002 at 09:53:05PM -0700, Chris Hecker wrote:
> 
> >At least for the windows solution, i strongly think a binary
> >distribution mechanism is what is needed for the users and also would
> >save a lot of time and 'howto build' kind of questions on the mailing
> >lists. There is no reason not to do so, i am no windows expert, but
> >windows offer a stable set of libraries and other system component that
> >can be relied upon to install ocaml binary packages upon. This already
> >works for ocaml itself.
> 
> Yes, binary distribution would work fine on windows.  Bytecode binary 
> distribution for most libraries should work fine on all platforms.

Yes, that would be a good start, windows binaries and bytecode.

The outside dependencies (the ones on things not ocaml related, tcl/tk,
gtk+ and so on) is the main difficulty here.

BTW, if it comes to that, i have plan to ship every debian package
containing programs (as opposed to library packages) as a single
bytecode package built without -custom and a native code version on the
arches that support them.

If things like file layout, external dependencies and library
distribution (in particular the stublibs) are resolved, i suppose you
could install these exact same packages on non-debian systems also.

I don't have time to work on this though :(((

> I think at this point it's more important to do something small and get it 
> going than it is to solve all possible package management problems.  Even 
> something that just allowed a standard way of getting a tar ball of source 
> for a given package and for its dependencies would be better than nothing, 
> and we could improve it as we went.
> 
> The -pack option made this a lot simpler, because now libraries can be 
> distributed as a single module.  If we make some relatively simple 
> standards for build targets I think we can start making progress.

But the -pack option is not yet standardized, and not used in much
cases, it seems to me.

> Of course, if something like apt would just work for us (on all platforms, 
> source and binary), then that would be excellent and we should just start 
> using it.

it will never just work, it 'just works' on debian, because of the
debian maintainers who do the work of making sure the packages work.

Friendly,

Sven Luther
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