Re: About this ocaml versioning stuff

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

On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 02:09:45PM +0200, Jérôme Marant wrote:
> Selon Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>:
> 
> > > This is not philosophy. I'm waiting for you to explain how to
> > > handle dependencies and to avoid 2 packages built against
> > > different ocaml to depend upon each other, and so on.
> > 
> > Ok. It depends on tzo different possible goals. In the easy one, it is
> > easy :
> > 
> >   We only support multiple ocaml versions, not libraries. We build all
> >   packages with the latest official package (the one ocaml wrapps and
> >   provies symlinks to). There is no difference from now, it is
> >   transparent for the user, apart from the ocamlrun issue.
> > 
> > In the more advanced setup, it is more complicated :
> > 
> >  We do as above, but on top of that, we build all libraries for each
> >  packages. We also use an advanced naming scheme for libraries,
> >  embedding both its compatibility version (needed by Stefano, but maybe
> >  not all libs) and its ocaml version, to obtain things like
> >  libfoo-<foo_version>-ocaml-<ocaml_version>[-dev].
> 
> *Caugh* *Caugh*

Sure, but there is really no other scheme. Notice that some of the
package don't really need a library version embedded, so we can just
have, for example, libzip-ocaml-3.07, which will not be all that ugly
after all. 

> > This second step gives quite ugly names for library, so maybe we could
> > also provide a virtual package with just the library name (foo) and the
> > devel name (foo-dev) on the latest library version going with the latest
> > official ocaml (the one the ocaml package points to).
> > 
> > It implies some work for the library packagers, but not too much. I
> > don't really know if this is worth it, but it would be the more complete
> > solution.
> 
> It is quite overkilling.

Yep, but maybe not as much as you think.

> ...
> 
> > Anyway, please read again the first mails i sent after i did the suffix
> > work. I told it was some heavy work, and that i was not entirely sure it
> > was worth it, and asking for opinions (but opinions after having looked
> > at what i did do).
> 
> But what does Xavier think of it, really?

I don't know, i wrote him and Pierre tw oor three times about this in
passing in other mails, and never got a reply. That is why i was asking
Maxence if he could get us a feeling of the ocaml team about this. I
will maybe simply ask him directly when i come back from debconf.

Friendly,

Sven Luther