[opam-devel] OPAM on Windows (1.3 Roadmap)

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

On 6 Nov 2014, at 01:30, Louis Gesbert <louis.gesbert at ocamlpro.com> wrote:
> 
> Le mercredi 5 novembre 2014, 18:06:32 David Allsopp a écrit :
>> 
>> But unless you guarantee that all 700/800 packages in OPAM do the same thing, at some point you will need a "real" environment - make, patch, m4, etc (you can't even get as far as findlib without m4) and ocamlopt's need for a C compiler, or at least an assembler, is never far away - and the two MSVC ports will *always* require you to install the Windows SDK separately to get the Microsoft assembler (I don't think packaging that in other setups is permitted under the licence).
>> 
>> I completely agree that making OPAM more portable is a good idea (ocaml-fileutils would be a very good thing to use), but my point is that it has *nothing* to do with making Windows usage of OPAM better, at least for non-toy usage so, at least for this part of the roadmap, it feels like effort targeted at the wrong problem.
>> 
> 
> You have a point ; this also depends on whether we have interest in a working OPAM on Windows _independently_ of the current OCaml OPAM repo or not. But let's be clear and mention this as the goal if we target a more portable OPAM depending as little as possible on POSIX tools.

I'm interested in the "portable OPAM depending as little on POSIX tools" for a few deployment targets beyond just Windows:

 - using OPAM on JavaScript with iocamljs notebooks, for teaching.

 - using OPAM to dynamically install packages in the MirageOS shell, which has no POSIX at all (it's just an OCaml toplevel DSL)

 - experimenting with using it as the solver for OpenBSD ports (which use BSD make)

-anil