[wg-windows] Improving the state of OCaml on Windows

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

On 29 May 2015, at 16:10, Thomas Braibant <thomas.braibant at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> - Finalize OPAM support for Windows (this is listed on the OPAM 1.3 roadmap). When this support is in place, many OCaml packages should work out of the box (with the proviso that many packages assume a unix-ish environment for their build system). 
> 
> - Discuss how to help package developers improve Windows support. One way to do that could be to provide know-how about how to setup continuous integration on services like Appveyor to check that packages build on typical Windows setups. 

One thing I would *really* like to do is to hook in the current experimental bulk builds of OPAM into Windows as well.  Right now we use Docker for Linux builds, but the plan is to expand this further (see https://opam.ocaml.org/builds/ <https://opam.ocaml.org/builds/> for the logs).

One way to make the results more useful is to open a brand new opam-repository just for Windows, with the build rules and patches ported over from the old WODI.  This could be the 'native' Windows repository, with the Unix one containing the minimal patches required for Cygwin support.  Unification could then happen over time, particularly as more declarative systems such as Assemblage mature.

We don't have the expertise to do the Windows porting here in Cambridge, but are very happy to set up and operate the build infrastructure on virtual machines if someone can point us at an OPAM remote...

-anil
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