Re: About this ocaml versioning stuff

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 09:47:50AM +0200, Jérôme Marant wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>   I've read the thread about ocaml 3.07 packages.
>   This is well known I don't agree with this because I think it
>   is useless and silly. I'd repeat that the problem comes from
>   testing scripts and not from ocaml packages, so testing script
>   must be fixed.

Yes, but that is only one small part of the problem.

>   I think that binaries must not be suffixed with a version because
>   compatibilities with other distro are going to be lost, especialy:
> 
>   - binary compatibility: binaries distributed must always
>     call #!/usr/bin/ocamlrun . Hence, you can run the same
>     binary everywhere.

We are broken anyway, since other distros use mostly
/usr/local/bin/ocamlrun, and anyway, i guess if we go this way, other
distros will go this way also. I hope upstream also has a chance to
going this way, but they didn't comment on it despite my repeated
questions.

Also, notice that it is ever possible to run the bytecode executables as
ocamlrun bytecode_file, and it will work whatever was descripted in the
#! entry.

I think this is a false problem, since after all the user could have
ocamlrun installed anywhere, and it could break anyway. Also, i don't
really care much about other distros or broken self installations. I
will not specially make thin,gs difficult for them, but not go out of my
way to stay compatible with them also, especially if said compatibility
thingy is a wrong problem like here.

>   - source compatibility: autoconf scripts are seeking for
>   ocamlc, ocamlopt and so on. At least, symlinks must always
>   been there.

Yep, this is a problem. But it is nothing we can't fix or educate
upstream to find. Also, there will be transparent 'latest ocaml'
wrappers, so there should be no problem, like with gcc, where you can
use either gcc or gcc-<version>. We have to fix stuff to build without
the wrapper in our packages though.

But again, it was kind of an experiment, i want feedback, and maybe we
should also get upstream opinion or the opinion of the community at
large. Maxence, can you comment on this, maybe, or ask Xavier
personnally about it ?

Friendly,

Sven Luther