Bug#678577: ocaml: -custom breaks ocamlrun and ocamldebug

[Ed Schwartz <edmcman@gmail.com>]

Hi Stéphane,

Thank you for your response.  I like the idea behind your patch, but
unfortunately the side effects are very serious.  Please consider how
this situation affects developers unaffiliated with Debian:

1. As a non-Debian developer, why should I not use -custom?  It's not
deprecated, and I cannot find any (OCaml) documentation saying not to
use it.

I've read over the threads between you and Xavier, and I understand
there are better mechanisms than -custom, but I only know about this
after spending hours of work trying to figure out why ocamldebug did
not work.  Also, Xavier has specifically stated that -custom is *not*
deprecated.

2. Debugging of non-Debian ocaml packages (which might use -custom) is
broken.  This is a serious problem, which has wasted at least ten
hours of my time.  In my opinion, this should really be fixed; it's a
large behavior change to make it the default.  At the *very* least it
should be clearly documented.  This is not even mentioned in
README.Debian.

3. As a developer, I should not need to incorporate Debian specific
hacks into my project, such as using OCAML_COMPAT.  If Debian needs to
change or break the behavior of standard, open source tools, the
Debian scripts should be changed to opt-in to these features, not the
other way around.

I really think the state of this patch in Debian could be improved, by
(in order of decreasing preference) 1) fixing the patch so ocamlrun
and ocamldebug work, 2) making the patch opt-in for Debian packages
only, 3) documenting the side effects of the patch.

I am even willing to help with a patch for the first solution, if
there is interest.

Thanks,
Ed

On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 2:29 PM, Stéphane Glondu <glondu@debian.org> wrote:
> Le 23/06/2012 00:04, Ed Schwartz a écrit :
>>>> Why do you use -custom if your executable works with plain ocamlrun?
>>
>> The Makefile that we use (https://bitbucket.org/mmottl/ocaml-makefile)
>> uses -custom by default.  Several libraries we link to also use
>> -custom.
>>
>>> See /usr/share/doc/ocaml-nox/README.Debian.
>>
>> Interesting... is the patch supposed to be compatible with ocamlrun
>> and ocamldebug?
>
> No. If you need the upstream behaviour, use the OCAML_COMPAT environment
> variable. And keep in mind that -custom should be avoided anyway.
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Stéphane
>