Re: Bug#876533: hol-light FTBFS with OCaml 4.05.0
On 03/11/2017 17:43, Ximin Luo wrote:
Hi Hendrik, any progress on this? I notice in the ocaml transition tracker:
I really spend more than 4 weeks in discussions with upstream
about license and copyright clarifications. Now it is finished. I
uploaded a new hol-light version to DOM git yesterday. Please
review and upload.
Ouch, well here are some comments:
dpkg-gencontrol: warning: package hol-light: unused substitution variable ${ocaml:Provides}
dpkg-gencontrol: warning: package hol-light: unused substitution variable ${perl:Depends}
These are quite important, you should never ignore them. You need to add an extra Provides: ${ocaml:Provides}, and add ${perl: Depends} to the already-existing Depends field.
(I actually don't know why dpkg-gencontrol doesn't just fail the build instead of emitting a warning. Perhaps for backwards-compat or something.)
The rest of the package looks fine, except that I am not sure about installing everything in /usr/share/hol-light.
If hol-light allows itself to be used as an importable ocaml library for other programs and code, then it should be installed in /usr/lib/ocaml/hol-light - AFAIU extrapolating the (out-of-date) Debian Ocaml packaging policy. I am not sure our Debian ocaml toolchain will pick up libraries installed into /usr/share - and you will have to move it into /usr/lib anyway if the project eventually provides native shared libs, since /usr/share must only contain architecture-independent files.
It would be good if someone else from the team less new than me, could explain this issue properly and/or confirm what I'm suspecting here.
Looking at the version currently in sid:
https://packages.debian.org/sid/amd64/hol-light/filelist
One can see that stuff is already installed in /usr/share/hol-light. I
didn't question this choice when I first sponsored this package, because
these files are not compiled (unlike "traditional" OCaml libraries).
They are not designed to be consumed by the standard OCaml toolchain.
Therefore, I don't consider the current situation as a violation of (or
an inconsistency with) the OCaml packaging policy: I consider hol-light
as an independant tool that happens to consume .ml files.
BTW, the listing above shows the inclusion of quilt's .pc directory in
/usr/share/hol-light, which is wrong.
If there are good reasons for installing it in /usr/share/hol-light (which seems to be inconsistent with the packaging policy, as I mentioned) please describe them in debian/README.Debian. For example, I can see that upstream does not have a proper "make install" target for this stuff, and you specify /usr/share yourself in d/rules. So perhaps it is not supposed to be used by other ocaml code, and you include stuff in /usr/share merely "for reference". If that is correct, please add this explanation to the README.
A note in README.Debian wouldn't hurt, indeed.
Cheers,
--
Stéphane
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