On Sat, Sep 05, 2009 at 10:44:58AM +0100, David Allsopp wrote:
> 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. You could even
> throw an editor in with it. Microsoft Installer is a command line compiler
> which reads text files so it can be targeted from make just like anything
> else and the script would pretty much only have to be written once and then
> someone would occasionally have to use a Windows box just to build it (and
> virtualisation means you can pretend that your Linux PC isn't even running
> Windows really). It would also not be too much work to have an MSVC version
> which simply explained that you must install the Windows SDK to get the C
> compiler (but, just like OCaml's own binary win32 files, you'd still get
> bytecode for nothing).

I don't think anyone's claiming it's not possible, just that no one
has actually done the work or offered to keep making up to date
releases.

It's a big project, but not big compared to other OCaml projects out
there, eg. Debian's OCaml project is far larger than is proposed for
an "Active OCaml" Windows installer.  For comparison, I reckon on
spending about one day a month maintaining the Fedora OCaml packages.

You just need to find some people who are technically competent on
OCaml on Windows, yet haven't ditched Windows for Linux for some
reason.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat