Hey,
How about bundling the installer with cygwin or msys? Beware of the
license issues however.
Well that's the usual debate : should the installer provide an entire
environment (e.g. msys + the right compilers), so that users can fire up
an "ocaml shell" and get all the good features (odb, native compilation,
etc.)? Or should the installer rather provide the basics only, and let
users pick msys or cygwin later on if they wish to do more advanced stuff?
With this release, I'm going with the minimalistic approach: the
installer provides just enough to do bytecode, and users are free to
install whatever environment they like if they wish to do native
compilation.
The rationale is as follows: if the user is an advanced user, they
probably have developer tools set up already, so I don't see much point
in providing them with another standalone environment that would
potentially conflict with theirs.
If a user wants to do advanced stuff (besides playing with the toplevel
and bytecode compilation in emacs), they can simply install cygwin + the
mingw-w64 compilers, and they're good to go. It really is a few clicks
to perform, and I'm not sure I can have the installer do that for them.
I'm open to more arguments, though. There still is the option of
prompting the user about whether they want to install msys + mingw-w64
during the install phase (I'm saying msys here because it's more
lightweight than cygwin, and easier to unzip as a whole). The installer
could then download the latest release, and unzip it alongside the OCaml
binaries, so that everything comes bundled together. That may be an
interesting solution, but bug 5465 is a showstopper, and of course it's
much more work :)
Cheers,
jonathan
Cheers,
Wojciech
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