[opam-devel] [Caml-list] Opam use for teaching lab infrastructure

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

On 20 Sep 2013, at 10:40, David MENTRE <dmentre at linux-france.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 2013/9/19 Roberto Di Cosmo <roberto at dicosmo.org>:
>> 
>>      You may need to help them installing the necessary development environment
>>      (gcc, m4, devl libraries, etc.), I do not know how to avoid this on a
>>      random laptop :-(
> 
> I am trying this approach: installing opam on a fresh Debian virtual
> machine for "students". With opam, how do you guess the needed
> external libraries?
> 
> With tarballs, I am usually reading the INSTALL or README file and
> install needed Debian packages. But how do I access to this
> information for opam packages? Is there a list somewhere of external
> (to opam) dependencies?

I maintained a rough set of monolithic dependencies in the jenkins/ source
directory of OPAM:
https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam/blob/master/jenkins/10-opam-prepare.sh

This is temporary, as OPAM 1.1dev has better support for describing external
dependencies within the package description via the `depexts` field.
The design of this is sketched out in:

http://anil.recoil.org/2013/09/09/ocamlot-autotriaging.html
(look for 'external system dependencies')

I'm still gluing together a sample version of this on Debian/OpenBSD, so
I'll mail this list requesting maintainers to help describe their external
dependencies when I have a working local setup with some sample packages.

For now, contributing to the monolithic install script above is welcome,
as I can use that as a reference when porting dexpexts over.

cheers,
Anil