[opam-devel] Package requires copying into a system directory

Dario Teixeira darioteixeira at yahoo.com
Fri Aug 15 16:12:26 BST 2014


Hi,

> I use higlo the tool in conjuction with omd [1] to make to syntactically 

> highlight ocaml code in my web log tool.

I wasn't aware of Higlo -- thanks for the pointer.  However, it does suffer
from a common syndrome among syntax highlighting projects: it supports one
or two input languages and leaves supporting others as an exercise for the
reader.  This makes it hard to overcome the catch-22 problem that hardly
anyone uses Higlo because it only supports a couple of languages, and no one
writes Higlo plugins for other languages because no one uses Higlo anyway.
Despite its problems, GNU Source-highlight did manage to get over this bump,
supporting pretty much any common and not-so-common language out there.

I'm convinced that any project aiming to replace GNU Source-highlight should
either a) use the same source language definitions as GNU Source-highlight
(or Emacs, or Vim), or b) include a converter from existing source language
definitions into its own native format.

Kind regards,
Dario


More information about the opam-devel mailing list