[opam-devel] opam binary snapshot

[Mika Illouz]

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for the discussion. A tool which publishes an existing OPAM
installation as one or more deb's would match our internal needs
rather nicely.  Since my knowlege of OPAM's and Debian's package
systems is superficial, I don't understand two technical questions:
First, how would the tool infer the dependencies to non-opam packages
managed by debian?  (Sylvain says this is easy).  Second, how would it
expose individual OPAM packages as debian packages?  On one extreme,
the entire OPAM installation is packaged as one deb; on the other, a
debian package is created from each corresponding OPAM package.

While this approach calls for a tool separate from OPAM itself, it
preserves OPAM's OS/distribution-neutrality.

On Oct 31 2013, Fabrice Le Fessant wrote:
> Is it important to target RPMs and DEBs, or would it be enough to
> have binary packages _inside_ opam ? i.e. "opam install MYPACKAGE"
> would install binary versions instead of source versions of
> MYPACKAGE and all its dependencies ?

Fabrice: I'm not sure I understand what your are proposing.  One of my
goals is to be able to distribute deb's derived from OPAM, but without
requiring OPAM.

On Oct 31 2013, Sylvain le Gall wrote:
> Maybe you are talking about directly generating a binary .deb ? (like
> directly an ar archive, but that is super tricky to do)

Sylvain:  I think that's what I want ...

> I could not resist the temptation to start the project:
> https://github.com/gildor478/opam2debian

Cool!

thanks
mika illouz