Le 16/12/2011 13:39, Alain Frisch a écrit : > 3. Binary packages are not created by casual users. It's not crazy to > require, at least in the short term, a decent Unix-like environment > (which includes a C compiler) in order to compile the libraries and > create the binary packages. It would be nice to adapt all the OCaml > libraries around so that they don't rely on external Unix tools, but > this is simply not going to happen.
Binary packages could be cross-compiled. This is what has been done for Coq dependencies [1]. Our goal while doing this was just to produce a working Windows version of Coq, but maybe the idea could be extended to provide a full development environment as envisioned in your point 1 (self-contained OCaml toolchain, with no C compiler). The "decent Unix-like" environment you mention would then be an actual existing (foreign) one. Cross-compiling raises the issue of testing of binary packages. But if we can get a working (and reasonably maintainable) OCaml toolchain on Windows, pure OCaml test-suites could be used to test them natively. I don't know about others, but the cross-compiling way would be my best choice: I don't really care about Windows itself, but I do care about Windows users of my software :-) [1] http://ocaml.debian.net/mingw32/ Cheers, -- Stéphane -- Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management and archives: https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
