[luther@debian.org: Re: "weird" naming convention for ocamlbuild executables]
----- Forwarded message from Sven Luther <luther@debian.org> -----
Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2007 08:36:42 +0200
From: Sven Luther <luther@debian.org>
To: debian-ocaml-maint@lists.debian.org, Nicolas.Pouillard@inria.fr,
Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org>
Subject: Re: "weird" naming convention for ocamlbuild executables
On Fri, Jun 15, 2007 at 01:11:08PM -0700, Christian Stork wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 09:11:11PM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> > Hi Nicolas,
> > I've another question related to the packaging / distribution of ocaml
> > 3.10.0.
> >
> > ocamlbuild comes shipped as 3 executables:
> > - /usr/bin/ocamlbuild.byte
> > - /usr/bin/ocamlbuild.native
> > - /usr/bin/ocamlbuild
> > with the latter being the best among the first two.
> >
> > That's fine per se, but breaks what it seems like to be a "convention"
> > in the distribution of other ocaml tools. All compilers for example
> > follow the convention of no extension for the bytecode version and .opt
> > for the native version, some goes for the new camlp4 executables.
> >
> > Any reason for breaking this internal convention? Wouldn't it be better
> > to adopt it for ocamlbuild as well (which is what we are actually doing
> > in the Debian package)?
>
> I would really argue against reverting back to the old convention. On
> the contrary, I think it is time to switch to the new "weird"
> convention, which is actually the only reasonable one. It makes no
> sense to always have to check for *.opt versions of executables when one
> simply wants the fastest available version. A link as provided by
> ocamlbuild is the best solution for this most common use case. The old
> convention seems to be a historical accident as ocamlc was there before
> ocmalc.opt.
>
> However, why not use *.opt instead of *.native for some degree of
> backward compatibility?
I like this new solution too. The plain name (the optimized one), could
be made an alternative, or even better yet, we could implement
the scheme we used to speak about a bit in the past years, where a
alternative-like mechanism allowed for system wide selection of either
all native binaries, or all bytecode ones, or individual overrides for
selected executables.
This would allow to try somehow embedding the version number in the
ocaml executables too, and so allow full parallel installation of ocaml
packages.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
----- End forwarded message -----
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- PhD in Computer Science ............... now what?
zack@{cs.unibo.it,debian.org,bononia.it} -%- http://www.bononia.it/zack/
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