Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] Version 1.0?

[John M. S. <sk...@oz...>]

Nicolas Cannasse wrote:


> I agree on this one . Modern software development and Internet are enabling
> a quick bug reporting/fix and then users only have to update their version.
> About this "update" and installation-made-easy of the ExtLib, I was thinking
> writing a small and simple OCaml program that will check and download the
> last extlib version , compile using ocamake (I think perhaps we should then
> put ocamake in the ExtLib) and install it in  'ocamlc -where'/extlib . 


I tried to do that once and users hated it :-)
They wanted a plain old tarball. Still, software like Internet
Explorer and Redhat Linux use this idea, but I suspect
it would be more useful if it could update multiple packages,
not just Extlib.

> I would like to have some comments from Unix users to know how we can make the
> user being able to choose the install directory and still have a nice and
> portable way of retreiving the install dir (needed by Makefile of program
> using ExtLib at linking time).


You can make an executable which is put in, say


	/usr/local/bin

or

	~/bin

extlib

which prints the install dir so people can write:

	ocamlc -I`extlib`

and add some options:

	extlib --help --version --test

it would also be tricky to have

	man extlib

tell where the installation went.

 
> Releasing with bugs is one point : theses can be fixed later.
> But releasing without any correct documentation IS a mistake.


	I agree.


-- 
John Max Skaller, mailto:sk...@oz...
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