On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 09:47:26AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote: > That said, if you speak about having all libs provide meta files, i > think it is a good idea, maybe you could write a little paragraph about > it for inclusion in the policy (and maybe also a little howto on it, as > i guess not everyone knows how to write them, and/or where to look for > this info). Ok, I've just added this point to my 'post-woody-todo-list'. Anyway by "using findlib" I mean two things: 1) provide a META file. As stated by Claudio this is a really easy task and where is not available we, as a debian maintainer, can write one and suggest upstream author to include it in next releases. 2) use findlib to _install_ themselves Reaching (1) is a good step also "politically" this solve in Debian the problem of knowing which is the version of a library currently installed. Currently findlib META files don't yet support a field that state the ocaml language compatibility versions, but this can be added easily asking to Gerd. This can solve a lot of problems issued by Denis. (2) is another good point but not really necessary for debianized packages. A big step will be that non debianized software use findlib to install without overriding default values so that files will be installed in whatever directory is the default debian findlib behaviour. Anyway we can't control this, but stating that debian ocaml policy requires findlib is a good political move that can help findlib spreading. Personally I think that findlib make build and installation easier but for debian packages that already have a working installation procedure I see no gain in switching to findlib. > Apart from that, i think we must reach consensus by discution. We are talking just for this ... > > With perl things are easier because every perl module install itself > > using the same tools, we can't solve this problem until we have a > > widespread tool for ocaml library distribution. > > This is an upstream issue, anything we do cannot work if upstream > sources that people install by hand will not adopt it. Sure. Perl installation is almost a de-facto standard, we can just try to impose a de-facto standard for OCaml library, nothing more. Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli - undergraduate student of CS @ Univ. Bologna, Italy zack@cs.unibo.it | ICQ# 33538863 | http://www.cs.unibo.it/~zacchiro "I know you believe you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant!" -- G.Romney
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