Re: About this ocaml versioning stuff
Selon Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>:
> > 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.
No, this is wrong. Red Hat and Mandrake, the most widely used commercial
distro are using /usr/bin .
> 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.
This is stupid. You never run bytecode this way. +x chmod'ing the bytecode
should be enough.
> 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.
You _have to_ care for other distro because users of ocaml packages
may distribute binaries that _should_ be executable on other distro.
Debian _cares_ for compatibilities with others distros (that's what
LSB is for).
> > - 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.
Why would the ocaml team support old versions of their compiler?
> 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 ?
You may need a rationale before asking ...
--
Jérôme Marant
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