Hi,
Thank you for your bugreport and apologies for not getting back to you
sooner.
On 17/06/2016 12:07, whitequark wrote:
Source: ocaml
Severity: normal
Dear Maintainer,
The ocaml package, as well as its sister packages ocaml-nox,
ocaml-base and
ocaml-base-nox, are missing a dependency on libncurses-dev. This is
apparent
when trying to build a bytecode executable with an embedded custom
runtime:
$ touch t.ml
$ ocamlc t.ml -custom
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lcurses
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
File "t.ml", line 1:
Error: Error while building custom runtime system
Because of this, packages that assume that they can build a custom
runtime
whenever they can build regular bytecode executables, which is in my
opinion
a fair assumption, break. A notable case where this presents a
significant
problem is when the OPAM package manager is used with a system OCaml
compiler.
Many notable packages, e.g. ocamlfind and lwt, build custom runtimes,
and
currently the OPAM packages have to be altered to either disable that,
when
possible, or else add an explicit dependency on ncurses-dev, through
the depext mechanism, which integrates OPAM with APT.
I acknowledge the problem. IIUI, the fix you're looking for is to move
the
dependency on libncurses5-dev from ocaml-nox to ocaml-base-nox. But
this raises
another question, why ocaml-base-nox is used to compile packages. Its
description contains the following bits:
This package contains only the runtime system needed to run bytecode
executables that do not use the graphics library. The 'ocaml' package
contains the full development suite of Objective Caml.
while ocaml-nox's description has:
This package contains everything needed to develop OCaml applications
that do not require the graphics library.
So, if you are trying to build ocaml binaries, ocaml-nox should be
preferred
over ocaml-base-nox.