On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 12:40:10PM +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> Yet Make is not expressive enough so we have OMake, OCamlBuild...

Make is perfectly expressive enough.

When you start an OCaml project, you certainly need to know a bunch of
stuff to write the autoconf/make framework, and it's not very well
documented.  Almost everyone starts from an existing project -- I
suggest starting from here[1].  IDEs let you start a project much more
easily because they write the boilerplate.

Ah but here's the problem: the boilerplate is meaningful, and sooner
or later you'll need to change it (eg. your project has some complex
code generation or you want to script some automated tests).  Now your
IDE is getting in the way, your beginner has to face all that "stuff"
which was hidden behind the scenes, and (in one IDE I used) you
couldn't edit the boilerplate at all!

Not to mention serious real world problems like collaborating with
people who don't want to use the IDE, version control, cross-
compiling, applying patches, making tarballs & RPMs, uploading to your
website, feeding patches back upstream, integration with l10n tools,
etc.  Most of which are way beyond what IDEs offer.

If you think the good people who develop libvirt could do it using an
IDE, you really don't understand the scope of the problem:

http://git.et.redhat.com/?p=libvirt.git;a=tree
http://git.et.redhat.com/?p=libvirt.git;a=blob;f=configure.in;h=8e04f14131cf68de6eee6eadd05c5704ea8a5d41;hb=HEAD
http://git.et.redhat.com/?p=libvirt.git;a=blob;f=Makefile.am;h=b5082d6a7eaf7c746c3e52d61f6eb952df79db42;hb=HEAD

Rich.

[1] http://hg.et.redhat.com/virt/applications/virt-top--devel click 'manifest'

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat