Re: Greetings!

[Sven LUTHER <luther@debian.org>]

On Thu, Jun 08, 2000 at 02:13:01PM -0400, Jerome Vouillon wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 05:02:01PM -0700, Brent Fulgham wrote:
> > I wanted to package up something that would be reasonably useful,
> > and since I didn't see these already in the archive I thought I'd
> > make a preliminary ITP here and see if anyone else is working
> > on them:
> > 
> > lablgtk  -- GTK interface for OCaml
> > mlgtk    -- GTK interface for OCaml (alternative)
> > GeneWeb  -- A geneology package written in OCaml.
> > efuns    -- An emacs-clone written in OCaml
> > 
> > Do any of these sound worthwhile to any of you?
> 
> I think it would be great to have a GeneWeb package.
> 
> Efuns is a cool hack, but I'm not sure it will interest a lot of
> people.

but people using debian will have the posibility to have it installed, and
maybe trough some fun stuff, they will become interrested in ocaml.

> Libraries are not so important, because programmer are used to compile
> things themselves.  But if you feel ready to maintain a lot of Caml
> packages, go ahead!

No, i am not in agreement with you on this, On a debian system, you should be
able to have as much stuff as possible preinstalled, and all dependant package
need to be packaged. Packaged libraries are a must and it is not so easy to
install libraries to be debian compliant.

And with the packaging system, lot of things can be done without the enduser
even noticing he is installing ocaml (maybe some will not even know what it
is) and thus we gain more widespread acceptance than it would be possible if
the user would have to grab, compile and install all the needed libraries
(some even don't install out of the box on a debian system). 


And also imagine for student, you can just tell them all what you need for
running ocaml programs like seen in class is available in debian, just install
the ocaml-task package.

> Note that there are also some cool libraries available there:
>    http://www.npc.de/ocaml/linkdb/
> For instance:
> - PCRE: Perl Compatibility Regular Expressions for OCaml
> - markup : Validating XML parser
> - OCamlODBC : ODBC interface for OCaml programs
> - netclient : Client for HTTP/1.1 protocol

lets package all of it.

Friendly,

Sven LUTHER