Re: Counter proposal for the multiple ocaml installed

[Sven Luther <luther@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr>]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 07:50:14PM +0200, Jérôme Marant wrote:
> 
> Hi,

Ok, now i have read your coounter proposal.

>   Since I don't agree with what has been proposed so far,
>   I'm going to propose something else:
> 
>   - only one stable version of OCaml in the archive so
>   we don't have to change anything

Mmm, this one doesn't really convince me, but let's say we use this ?

>   - possible ocaml-cvs snapshot would be installed in
>   /usr/lib/ocaml-cvs/bin
>   /usr/lib/ocaml-cvs/lib/ocaml
>   /usr/lib/ocaml-cvs/share
>   and so on.

And why not /usr/lib/ocaml/cvs ?

>   and we tell people in the README.Debian that they have to
>   look for the compiler in /usr/lib/ocaml-cvs/bin (everything
>   else will work fine sine compilers will have everything pointing
>   to this toplevel directory)

This is awkward and ugly. Why not put the binaries in
/usr/bin/ocamlc-cvs or something such ?

Please reread your counter proposal, and you will see that it is not a
very serious proposal.

The main point is that you don't want more than one ocaml installed, and
are using somewhat lame solution for justifying it, no offense meant,
but if you look again at your proposal, i suppose you will agree with
me.

Now, let's suppose the following :

  - We only have one official suite of ocaml installed. (same as you)

  - We move the libdir to /usr/lib/ocaml/<version_number>

  - If we package ocaml-cvs, the libdir will be
    /usr/lib/ocaml/cvs-<date> and the binaries will go into
    /usr/bin/<name>-cvs-<date>. We can even remove the date if needed.
    Naturally, no libraries will be built for the cvs version of ocaml.

Would this, if you compare it point to point to your proposal, not sound
more clean and logical ?

The only difficulty is moving libraries to the new ocamllib dir, and
this can be done by simply rebuilding the libraries with the new ocaml
package. Since i will bump the ocaml-3.06 virtual package, it will not
be possible for old libraries to install alongside this new package.

Total change for libraries :

  o need to change dependencies by bumping it to 3.06.1

  o need to rebuild the package.

Is this too much asking ?

That said, even if we don't have multiple versions of ocaml installed,
then we still gain by doing this, in making things easier for the people
hand installing stuff.

Friendly,

Sven Luther