[opam-devel] global installation with opam

Thomas Gazagnaire thomas at gazagnaire.org
Wed Dec 10 23:30:29 GMT 2014


> I do wonder why Thomas thinks that OPAMROOT is a bad solution though.  It
> seems quite clean to me -- you can have an OPAM installation pointing to
> (e.g.) /usr/local/opam and either add that your global PATH or symlink binaries
> into /usr/local/bin.

you can indeed have things under /usr/local/opam, but what you might want is to have libs in /usr/local/lib, binaries in /usr/local/bin to integrate with your system better etc... homebrew solves this by taking ownership of /usrl/local, but we clearly don't want this for opam (I think) :-)

I think having a special "global" switch could makes sense and could be implemented without too much hassle. Need to special case https://github.com/ocaml/opam/blob/master/src/core/opamPath.ml to use global paths. Requiring the user to install ocaml and ocamlfind only could help (so we need to implement a the detection of an "external" ocamlfind) as we don't need to support other external ocaml libs (which can become a pain when you want to upgrade ...).

So I think that adding that kind of limited support for global packages could makes sense and is not too hard to do.

Thomas


> 
> This could be scripted up with a fairly trivial shell script (caveat: that I
> haven't actually written).
> 
> -anil
> 
>> On 10 Dec 2014, at 23:12, Thomas Gazagnaire <thomas at gazagnaire.org> wrote:
>> 
>> A (bad) solution is to set change OPAMROOT to an appropriate location.
>> 
>> Thanks for the write-up, this is very helpful to understand the use-cases. I've created https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues/1895 to track that.
>> 
>> Best,
>> Thomas
>> 
>> 
>>> On 10 Dec 2014, at 13:16, Simon Cruanes <simon.cruanes.2007 at m4x.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hello,
>>> 
>>> Is there a blessed way to install packages system-wide using Opam? I
>>> suspect there isn't, so I attached a document [1] that describes my
>>> use-cases and what I'm thinking of (of course I know you opam
>>> developers are busy).
>>> 
>>> Thanks!
>>> 
>>> Best,
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> Simon
>>> 
>>> [1] http://cedeela.fr/~simon/files/opam_system.html
>>> or joined file
>>> 
>>> http://weusepgp.info/
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