2009/9/5 David Allsopp <dra-news@metastack.com>:

> I'm not sure that one is allowed to redistribute the Microsoft C compilers
> directly without a license, but packaging MSYS or the relevant parts of
> Cygwin along with OCaml and Batteries would create an installer somewhere
> between 150-300MB which compared to the 16GB of trial software I downloaded
> from the Microsoft website the other day is not that bad.

 That's what I'm doing for my local needs, approximately.  First of
all, I have an infrastructure to build so called "packages".  global
configure script (allows to choose installation prefix, library
paths), a lot of patches, platform-specific build scripts, some
dependency-stuff.  Patches allow me to hardcode paths in some places
(ugly, but it works).  I'm building it under platforms that are
interesting for me, for now it's only mingw/win32 and ubuntu, maybe
I'll build under freebsd later.  I'm enjoying the pleasure of patching
everything: for example, I made ocamlnet (fastcgi part) working on
mingw.  "Packages" are building and working both under mingw and
linux. (working as far as I have tested -- using "test" targets when
available, or using the library in my code).  The selection of
packages is incomplete, but that's the packages I'm using and its
dependencies: camltemplate camlzip camomile cryptokit deriving extlib
findlib json-static lablgtk2 lwt menhir objsize ocaml-bitstring
ocaml-sqlite3 ocaml-ssl ocamlgraph ocamlnet omake ounit pa_do
pa_safeuse pcre-ocaml sexplib type-conv ulex xmlm.  (there are no
batteries for now)

 Then, some revisions of my project become binary.  I'm making 4
zip-archives under windows: 1. base installation of mingw, msys,
tcl/tk, gtk+ in standard places (c:\mingw, etc), 2. archive that adds
unpacked .tar.gz with mingw C libraries, 3. archive that contains
compiled ocaml + findlib, 4. archive with other ocaml libraries.  So,
installing fresh ocaml and libraries under fresh win32 is just
unpacking 4 zip-archives in c:\ , and adding something like "call
c:\ocaml\set-vars.bat" or ". c:/ocaml/set-vars.sh" in build script.

 I don't distribute it mainly because of the following reasons.  1.
License questions for binary builds.  For my local needs I can do
whatever I want, until it doesn't leave my host and nobody sees it.
(so, guys, you haven't seen all what I've described before)  2. The
complexity of building the system from sources under windows: approx
17 files to download, some of them you install, others you unpack
(.tar.gz, .tar.bz2, not very comfortable for windows).  3. I don't
want to support cygwin (I'm even not installing it at all), and I
don't support msvc and win64 architectures (I don't need it for now).
 Maybe the reason#1 can be solved by building ocaml compiler without
my local patches and reading licenses carefully.