On Wednesday 21 November 2007 19:10, Richard Jones wrote:
> I guess it depends what you mean by "forking", but it's standard
> practice, in all areas not just OCaml, for a single source package
> (eg. ocaml-3.10.0.tar.gz) to generate many different binary packages
> (eg. ocamlc, ocamlopt, ocamldoc, camlp4, labltk, etc.)

Ok.

> This means that you can install just the bits you need, and
> furthermore that another package only needs to depend upon the parts
> it actually uses -- this saves disk space & network bandwidth!

Right.

> The camlp5 package installs in $OCAMLLIBDIR/camlp5 so it doesn't
> conflict with camlp4 from the base OCaml package, with an appropriate
> findlib META file.  You need to make some adjustments to your Makefile
> but those are usually very minor compared to rejigging your source to
> be compatible with the new camlp4.

For me, this begs the obvious question: can the distros split off the OCaml 
stdlib into a separate package so the community can improve it and 
Debian/Ubuntu/Red Hat/Mac OS X/.. users can benefit from an improved version?

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e