Re: Installing more of OCaml

[Alain.Frisch@ens.fr]

Hello again,

I'm not subscribed to debian-ocaml-main so I missed the thread on
"Installing more of OCaml" (thanks to Zack for pointing it to me). Could
you put me in Cc: for the follow-up of the discussion ?

Zack:
> The request sounds reasonable to me, but I would like to better
> understand if and how this package could be useful to anyone else than
> the CDuce project. Alain, could you please elaborate on that? You surely
> know better than me the structure of the ocaml compiler sources ...

Giving access to the internals of the compiler opens the door to many nice
applications. A few examples, that require only the stuff in parsing/
utils/ typing/:

- a pretty-printer generator for types (and other generic functions),
  in the spirit of IoXML, but starting from .cmi instead of source files
  (it's cleaner because it has access to the "real" type definition, even
  if some part is defined in another module, etc...)

- a web-service generator (takes a .cmi and generate a wrapper to publish
  the module as a webservice + WSDL)

- search tools on the types of exported values

- embedded toplevel, which can access type information

- automatic stub generator for various languages (even for C: e.g. from a
  .cmi generates a .c skeleton)

Sven:
> Alain, will you then package the CDuce stuff and have it sponsored into
> debian or something such ?

Zack already set up an apt-gettable repository for the last release of
CDuce. What is the "sponsoring" procedure to get a package into the
"real" Debian ?



-- Alain