Re: Make ocaml-best-compilers non-virtual

[Stéphane Glondu <glondu@debian.org>]

On 31/10/2016 08:35, Ximin Luo wrote:
> I think we might have to make ocaml-best-compilers a real package, so that we can have versioned Build-Depends: rules on it.
>
> Currently the ocamlbuild in experimental is using ocaml 4.02.3 from sid. I need to force it to compile against ocaml 4.03.0 instead so that it generates 4.03.0-versioned .cmi files, otherwise the camlp4 build fails (and others will too).
>
> However, if I simply add "ocaml-best-compilers (>= 4.03.0)" into Build-Depends I still get an error like:
>
> dpkg-checkbuilddeps: error: Unmet build dependencies: ocaml-best-compilers (>= 4.03.0)
>
> so it looks like we can't do this for virtual packages. (Yes, I do have 4.03.0 installed For Sure Totally).
>
> The alternative is to just say "ocaml-native-compilers (>= 4.03.0) | ocaml-interp (>= 4.03.0)" explicitly but this kind of defeats the point of having ocaml-best-compilers in the first place.

Sorry for jumping in late in the discussion.

I am wondering why we have a separate ocaml-native-compilers binary 
package in the first place. It has been so since the beginning of the 
git history in 2003.

I propose to merge ocaml-native-compilers into ocaml-nox altogether. As 
a transitional step, ocaml-nox would provide ocaml-best-compilers and 
ocaml-native-compilers but eventually we could get rid of that. This has 
been on my TODO-list for a while, but I didn't take time to first start 
the discussion.

For the record, on unstable/amd64, ocaml-nox is 46.2 MB and 
ocaml-native-compilers is 15.9 MB (and has no additional dependencies). 
In a clean chroot, installing ocaml-nox brings 93.1 MB of dependencies. 
Adding 15.9 MB to that sounds harmless to me.

What do you guys think of this plan?


Cheers,

--
Stéphane