Re: installation with opam install files
Hendrik Tews:
>
>>> install-script: add an install script to the new topkg package,
>>
>> This could work for packages that ship a static install file. But what
>> happens for packages that generate their install file during the build?
>
> The script needs to be sufficiently complex to deal with all
> possible configurations. Which is what ordinary makefiles do in
> there install target.
>
> The downside of the install-script approach is that we would need
> to maintain such scripts for all packages in the transitive
> build-depends closure of opam that use topkg, for instance also
> for cmdliner.
>
>>> perl-installer: write a replacement for opam-installer, for
>>> instance in perl.
>>
>> This is my preference.
>
> Also my preference now. I am discussing this build dependency
> cycle off-list also with Daniel Bünzli. There I learned that
> there is already an OCaml library that can read these .install
> files: opam-file-format. The perl-installer will therefore
> probably be written in OCaml.
>
> I am also discussing with Daniel the chance that upstream solves
> the problem for us by changing opam-installer such that it does
> not depend on all the build-dependencies of opam. The outcome
> here is not clear yet, but assuming upstream decides to go this
> way, how long are we willing to wait? Or, the other way round,
> how long can we wait before updating cmdliner and all the other
> packages that now depend on topkg? I guess waiting for 2-3 month
> would be fine, but if the delay would be longer, we should pursue
> our own solution?
>
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. Unlike topkg-care, we can't ignore opam-install. opam is much bigger than topkg, we would have to duplicate more.
What is the tool that actually generates these .install files? Instead of "opam-installer --script" that converts these files into a script, maybe we can ask them to write a "gen-install-file --script" that directly generates a script? We could enable this in Debian whereas it could be disabled by default elsewhere. That shouldn't be too hard right?
X
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