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Re: roadmap to OCaml >> 3.11 in Lenny+1



Hello,

On Sun, Feb 08, 2009 at 03:40:24PM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

> - pretty please consider switching to the OCaml CDBS class, if you
>   don't use it yet. I know there is people which don't like CDBS (and
>   I'm not particularly in love with it either), but it is essential to
>   be able to rely on some common build practices and on toolchain
>   components which factorize behavior out of single package. If you
>   don't want to use CDBS itself, please provide an "API" in your
>   debian/* files which implements the same of the CDBS class we
>   currently have

If we need a particular API (I guess that means make targets in debian/rules?)
then there is one canonical place to document these: the debian ocaml policy.
That's what it was made for. I do not want to dig into some cdbs documentation
to find out what I have to do in order to keep packages in shape when I'm not
using cdbs.

I am not yet decided about whether I would like to switch to cdbs or not. The
problem for me is that I have no idea what all these magic include files are
doing. This is of course my fault since I intended since a long time to look
into the documentation and never came around to do it (like for other things).
It is important to be able to understand what debian/rules actually does.
Using debhelper this is easy (probably with a finite number of "man dh_*).
With cdbs I loose the possibility to easily access hat control when I have to.
Peter's talk yesterday at Fosdem didn't help to convice me.

I am not saying that cdbs is bad. Adding abstraction where it can reasonably be done
is in general a good thing, and I see that it has the potential to improve package
quality. I just think that is too early, at least for me.

Cheers -Ralf.


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