On Tue, Jan 05, 2010 at 01:51:56PM +0100, Romain Beauxis wrote:
> Well, I'm interested to contribute on this and, as I wrote, I already
> sucessfuly compiled such a cross-compiler localy.
Cool, that a very good start :-)
> However, this is not a task I want to address alone. I believe this should be
> a team-based decision, for several reasons:
Fair enough.
> * The cross-compiler packaging should benefit from the main compiler's
> packaging. It may even be very similar.
Well, to that end, I believe that the current packaging of ocaml in Git
can be very useful: I can easily imagine a cross compiler ocaml package
having as "upstream" the main ocaml packaging hence gaining the ability
to push/pull changes and ever cherry-pick specific patches. We already
have the technology to handle that, from there on is a matter of
technical choices of the first/main maintainer of the cross compiler.
> * We need to discuss a policy for such a cross compiler:
> o Where to install it ?
> o What name to give it ?
I'm not an expert on cross compilation (used that only once in a while,
never packaged a cross compiler), but the first thing we should look for
is some sort of common way of doing things. Given that you seem
knowledgeable on the subject, can you please report to all of us which
naming/path choices other cross compilers available in Debian have done?
Once those are clear we can easily come to a reasoned decision for an
OCaml cross compiler ...
> * We eventually need to decide what we want to do about cross-compiled
> modules. For native modules, it should not be difficult, and I believe that we
> may be able to compile a cross-compiled module only by changing the default
> ocamlc and etc.. For modules which link to binary objects, such as bindings,
> this might be a little bit more difficult since we also need a cross-compiled
> version of the corresponding library..
I've voiced a humble opinion on this already. I believe we should
refrain from packaging cross-compiled modules unless they are proven to
be needed *and* useful to at least some users, given that they come at a
price (if only the need of multiplying the places that must be fixed
upon security flaws). Once more, this kind of problems do not seem
specific to OCaml though, what does the gcc-mingw32 people do for their
libraries?
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature