Re: ocaml and lindows.com
On Wed, Nov 05, 2003 at 04:59:51PM -0800, David FOx wrote:
> We have done several projects here using ocaml, because me and two other
> senior engineers here have a long history with functional programming
> languages. I wrote the back end of the Click-n-Run software warehouse
> in ocaml. This takes the Debian repository and reprocesses all the
> packages to generate the database information used by the front end (the
> catalogue) and modifies the packages so that they fit into our
> distribution, modifying and generating KDE menu entries and so forth.
> This turns out to be a little more complicated than it first sounds,
> because you have to modify the version numbers on the packages, and then
> you have to modify all the equals dependencies, and so on and so forth.
>
I'll be very interested in this code. Where can i have access to it ( even
if it is dead code, i really be interested in reading -- and copying it
).
> The other major use is in our new hardware detection system. I
> basically did a literal translation of a lot of perl code we inherited,
> which is my excuse why it is still pretty ugly. But it had to be
> drop-in compatible. This version isn't available for download yet, but
> it will be late in the year. There are ocaml components that manage the
> boot loader, the PCI device mapping, and the X configuration.
>
Very promising...
> There are also small programs that manage things like scanning the
> system for mime types and building a mozilla configuration file. There
> is also a build environment creator, similar to pbuilder. And I wrote a
> little cgi program called jiffytask to turn bugzilla into more of a
> project manager. So far the only ocaml code whose source you can access
> from our website is lindowsos-mimetypes - search for it in our warehouse
> and click on the specifications page for the link. It is completely
> uninteresting, another translation job turning weird little xml files
> into another big weird xml file, but it make Mozilla happy. The
> detector will be available when our next release comes out. The
> warehouse program is, unfortunately, retired. It is being rewritten by
> others in (sniff) Perl. We regret this somewhat, but we didn't want to
> push people into a language they weren't comfortable with.
>
I agree that it is very hard to see this beautifull langage being
replaced by this ugly PERL ( :-> ). I think that is what we call
freedom...
All your program seems to be very promising, i am really interested in
reading some part of your code, if you can.
Kind regard
Sylvain LE GALL
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