[opam-devel] Start of an opam multi-architecture proposal

[Daniel Bünzli]

Hello,   

I started to write down a few ideas for supporting multiple architecture (i.e. cross-compilation) in opam. It's far from complete, glosses over many details and maybe too simplistic — but I have the feeling that it's better to try to keep things simple in that setting.

I will certainly not be the person who can fill in all the details — especially on how to solve and resolve dependencies, I'm sure the solver experts have a better idea of what is needed here than what I'm proposing. People who are familiar with `apt` multi-architecture support may also be in a better position to design this.

So I just dumped my broken set of ideas on the opam wiki so that people can help to improve it and bring it to a full proposal:  

https://github.com/ocaml/opam/wiki/opam-multiarch

Feedback and discussion about the general approach is better done on this list I think. And this should start with whether the support should be handled as an inter or intra switch feature; this proposal being the latter (for these reasons [1]). I know there were attempts at the former so it would be nice if we could reach consensus on this first.

Best,  

Daniel

[1] https://github.com/ocaml/opam/wiki/opam-multiarch#alternative-designs