[opam-devel] opam binary snapshot

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

On 31 Oct 2013, at 15:35, Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain+ocaml at le-gall.net> wrote:

>> RPMs/debs would definitely be nice. There would be a problem doing this
>> right now as you'd have to do some sort of two pass thing to get the
>> list of files installed by the package, which is required for both RPMs
>> and debs.
>> 
> 
> You don't need the list of files for a Debian package.... You don't
> even need the dependencies, since it is auto-computed (except for
> depending on executable, but this is a minor annoyance, lib deps are
> computed).
> 
> Maybe you are talking about directly generating a binary .deb ? (like
> directly an ar archive, but that is super tricky to do)

I think Jon's point is that this work needs to happen for RPMs, and they
need to generate both Debs and RPMs.  This implies that OPAM needs to
support the lowest common denominator.  More generally, tracking file
manifests is useful for direct uninstallation support in OPAM, and also
for other packaging systems such as BSD ports.

-anil