Re: future: automatic and sound OCaml dependencies

[Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org>]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 08:37:22AM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 10:08:11PM +0000, Richard Jones wrote:
> >   ocaml(List) = da1ce9168f0408ff26158af757456948
> 
> because that line might be the reason why a package is uninstallable
> in testing (even temporarily). That someone will then have to
> understand which packages fix it, and doing so with a 16 characters
> long hash is not necessarily handy. That was the point of "meaningless
> for humans", where maybe "humans" can be replaced for "non-OCaml
> programmers" (even though even for them md5sum are not "handy" at
> all).
> 
> But on a second though, even users can be faced with such hashes, for
> example due to errors in the archive which can be temporarily
> inconsistent or because their package manager is incomplete WRT
> dependency solving. In that case, the md5sums pop up in error messages
> and, I believe, they will confuse sensibly the user.

Fair enough, although I have to say that users never see them.  Yum
will bail much earlier on if it cannot download a consistent view of
the archive.

Anyway, the much bigger problem is ocamlobjinfo and some "extra"
modules that you'll see.  Currently we hard-code a list of modules to
ignore.  At the moment that list is:

  Asttypes
  Parsetree
  Outcometree

(and for things like Calendar we have to explicitly list all the
submodules to ignore them).

I'm also interested to know if you find a way to get ocamlobjinfo to
display submodules.  I even tried looking at the .cmo file format but
couldn't find out how to derive the module/submodule relationship
between modules.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat