On 02/13/2012 06:01 AM, Arnaud Spiwack wrote:
I see an immediate problem with packages that install several executable files (for instance, Melt provides a library and a collection of tools, none of them named melt, by the way). I haven't spent time looking more than superficially into oasis or odb yet, but it strikes me as a possibly important limitation.
It looks like the executable is now named melt-build. In this case, odb would expect the melt project name to be "melt-build" so that its simple logic can detect if melt is already installed. This does not have any affect beyond changing the name that must be typed on the command line to install melt (`odb melt-build` instead of `odb melt`), and the name for dependencies by other projects (projects depending on melt would have to specify `dep=melt-build` instead of `dep=melt`).
Also, if melt installs an ocamlfind library named melt, then its odb package name could be melt or melt-build, depending on which part of melt should be used to detect its installation. At the moment, odb doesn't really do version handling (mainly because it's difficult to get a version number from an executable), although this is a weakness where odb might improve.
This assumption of executables and libraries being named the same as the package isn't critical to the design of odb, it's just a simplifying assumption that works quite well (and would work for melt up to the last version when its executable was renamed). If there's good reason to have more complex installed-program detection, this is easily doable, but the workarounds are simple enough at the moment that this doesn't seem to be a problem.
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