New issue
Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.
By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.
Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account
ocamlopt -shared -o creates by-products in a confusing place; documentation clarification welcome #6700
Comments
Comment author: @gasche This behavior is actually consistent with the way other compilation command work, such as when you ask to produce a bytecode executable from a source file (or several source files) directly: ocamlc -o foo remote/module.ml will first compile module.ml into a module.cmo (choosing to produce the compiled files in remote/), and then link the produced .cmo into a bytecode executable. Notice the difference with the two-step process ocamlc -o module.cmo -c remote/module.ml which produces everything in the current module -- and has the ability to say so explicitly. In the same way you can produce your .cmxs as follows: ocamlopt -o module.cmx -c remote/module.ml and no byproduct will be stored in remote/. I'm worried by the idea of changing the default behavior in this use-case (the risk of breaking other build scripts seems important). Could you not use the more precise two-step process instead? |
Comment author: michipili Thank you for your feedback. Using the more precise two-step procedure is of course feasible and there is no need to change ocaml behaviour. Looking at the official documentation¹, I could not deduce properly how to prepare dynlink native plugins. Maybe I overlooked something, maybe the description of the -shared flag could be enhanced by using a stance similar to the one used for the -a flag:
In its current phrasing, the description of the -shared flag misses two important features present in the snippet above:
In my opinion, using a similar wording to describe the -shared and -a flags would clarify the manual. But this is just my opinion! :) ¹ http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml-4.02/native.html |
Comment author: @gasche That seems sensible. If you or anyone is motivated to provide a better-worded patch, I'm ready to merge it. https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-manual/blob/trunk/manual/cmds/native.etex |
This issue has been open one year with no activity. Consequently, it is being marked with the "stale" label. What this means is that the issue will be automatically closed in 30 days unless more comments are added or the "stale" label is removed. Comments that provide new information on the issue are especially welcome: is it still reproducible? did it appear in other contexts? how critical is it? etc. |
Original bug ID: 6700
Reporter: michipili
Status: acknowledged (set by @gasche on 2014-12-15T14:17:34Z)
Resolution: open
Priority: normal
Severity: minor
Platform: amd64
Category: documentation
Tags: junior_job
Monitored by: @gasche @hcarty
Bug description
When I run ocamlopt -shared and use -o to arrange to that the output file is not
in the same directory as the source file, I see that by-products (*.o and *.cmi)
are stored along the source file.
It is expected that these by products are stored in the same directory as the file given as argument to the -o option. Indeed,
This is the behaviour of the compiler when producing a cmi as a a by-product
of a cmo file.
The sources can sit on a read-only media and the user guarantees that the
path used with the -o file is writeable.
Makefiles using the objdir-system¹ to store object files in a directory
distinct from the sources are easier to use if no object file is created
in the source directory.
¹: esp BSD Owl (https://github.com/michipili/bsdowl/wiki/DevelopOCamlSoftware)
Steps to reproduce
mkdir remote
touch remote/module.ml
ocamlopt -shared -o module.cmxs remote/module.ml
ls -R
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: