[ocaml-infra] markdown in "pure" OCaml

[Philippe Wang]

(3 replies below)

On Jul 25, 2013, at 22:41 PM, David Sheets <kosmo.zb at gmail.com> wrote:

>>> Just a note: if you use a git tag, github will automatically generate
>>> a tarball available at
>>> <https://github.com/[user]/[repo]/archive/[tag].tar.gz>
>> 
>> Thanks David.
>> However this means that I'd be able to create archives only of versions that have a tag in github…
>> (e.g., I could not modify 2 lines and create a tar ball without git-commiting the changes...)
> 
> I'm not sure I understand your use case; however, any ref has a
> corresponding archive:
> https://github.com/pw374/omd/archive/master.tar.gz for an archive of
> the HEAD of the master branch.

I don't really like it (because I hate tar balls with generic names or hash-based names) but okay, I won't battle against it.

On Jul 25, 2013, at 22:50 PM, Daniel Bünzli <daniel.buenzli at erratique.ch> wrote:

>> One of the reason for writing a "pure" OCaml version was that it could easily be embedded on a webpage with Js_of_ocaml (for those who would want that). I believe recursion is not well handled with Js_of_ocaml (please tell me if I'm wrong).
> Self-recursion is ok. Mutually recursive functions is not. 

ok, that could lead to some "funny" programming style… ;-)

On Jul 26, 2013, at 24:50 AM, Ashish Agarwal <agarwal1975 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 5:32 PM, Philippe Wang <philippe.wang at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
>>>> I'll put (old-fashioned tar-balls) snapshots in the github repo when it starts working.
>>> 
>>> Just a note: if you use a git tag, github will automatically generate
>>> a tarball available at
>>> <https://github.com/[user]/[repo]/archive/[tag].tar.gz>
>> 
>> Thanks David.
>> However this means that I'd be able to create archives only of versions that have a tag in github…
>> (e.g., I could not modify 2 lines and create a tar ball without git-commiting the changes...)
>> 
> Why would you want to create a tarball of something not committed?

Sometimes you might want to create a tar ball of something that's been generated...

> Also, I'm not sure what you mean by put tarballs "in the repo". I hope you won't do either of these things. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding.

Ok, until I change my mind, I won't put tar balls in the repo.

But to answer your question, here's a reason why I believe it can be relevant not to use github's archives.
Say I'm developing some software, and when I want to distribute it, (whatever my reasons) I don't want to distribute the whole thing or the way it is in the repo. So, I manually make packages when I want to distribute the software. 

It's one thing to have a public git repository to which anyone can "pull request", and that's for developers who might want to contribute.
It's another to distribute software to people who want to use it and have no intention of contributing to it.
In the first case, it would likely be bad indeed to distribute something that has not been committed. But in the second case, I don't see the same problem.

For instance, a good motivation for distributing something that's different from the github repo is if parts of the end-user code are generated using a tool and you don't want to "force" your users to have that tool (but it's ok to "force" contributors to have it). For OMD, I have considered using MPP[1] to generate parts of it. If I do that, I don't want to force users of OMD to have MPP, so I would rather distribute preprocessed ml files. Does it make sense? or do you have a better way?

Cheers,
Philippe



[1] MPP: https://github.com/pw374/MPP-language-blender