Re: installation with opam install files

[Hendrik Tews <hendrik@askra.de>]

Ximin Luo <infinity0@debian.org> writes:

> Similar to the topkg-care situation, if they are going to keep it in
> the same tarball as opam, this improves the Debian situation only
> marginally since we'd have to do that source-duplication thing again.

I agree that the source duplication is not nice. However, if
upstream splits it in two packages that must always go in
look-step, the effort for us will be almost the same, IMO.

The dust around different solutions for the topkg problem has not
settled yet: There is a new proposal now:

upstream-opam-fix: Change cmdliner and opam upstream such that
       they can be installed without topkg and without a
       build-dependency cycle.

> What is the tool that actually generates these .install files? Instead
> of "opam-installer --script" that converts these files into a script,

I believe it is topkg that generates these .install files. Yes,
adding installation capabilities to topkg itself is also an
option. However, the t in topkg stands for transitory, I have the
impression the plan is to trash topkg in the not too far future
(maybe opam 2).

Hendrik