[opam-devel] Does pin git:// really make sense ?

[Daniel Bünzli]

Le lundi, 3 juin 2013 à 11:59, Anil Madhavapeddy a écrit :

> In general, it's preferable to separate the packaging from the sources since they change at different rates. For instance, Debian packages recommend the same thing:
> https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam/issues/149#issuecomment-16041625


I'm not sure I'm really convinced by that argument for me a package manager like debian (end-user oriented) is still something quite different from opam (developer oriented).  

Besides it's not because they are in the git repo that they need to be tied to the corresponding version checkout (keep in the repo a map from versions to checkout that have the correct metadata for the version). I quite like this idea of self-describing repos that you can navigate by following references to commits, it looks a lot like the web where you gradually follows references that are returned in the representations you ask.  Anyways.

> (Either way, I'd record your use case as a bug on the OPAM tracker to ensure we don't forget this conversation).

Tried to do that here:

https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam/issues/637

Initially I was planning to have an erratique-unstable repo with git package of all my software with special opam files to build them from a checkout. So that I could easily point to that for people to try the HEAD of one of my packages. I now realize that, as you mentioned before it's a little bit problematic, as it would force them to use the HEAD of all my packages.

I think I'll now change the strategy and make an opam file that automatically detect if it's a checkout or not and performs whatever is needed to build the thing, so that people can simply pin the git repos instead of adding a new opam repository.

Daniel