[opam-devel] global installation with opam

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

On 10 Dec 2014, at 23:32, Thomas Gazagnaire <thomas at gazagnaire.org> wrote:
> 
>> I think having a special "global" switch could makes sense and could be implemented without too much hassle. Need to special case https://github.com/ocaml/opam/blob/master/src/core/opamPath.ml to use global paths. Requiring the user to install ocaml and ocamlfind only could help (so we need to implement a the detection of an "external" ocamlfind) as we don't need to support other external ocaml libs (which can become a pain when you want to upgrade ...).
>> 
>> So I think that adding that kind of limited support for global packages could makes sense and is not too hard to do.
> 
> to be more complete: this will make system compiler and ocamlfind updates more complicated, but I think that Louis is already looking at this for the "compiler-as-a-package" stuff.

The proliferation of special switches makes me nervous as the testing matrix gets larger and larger.  We already run into this with system vs custom compiler regularly.  I agree that we should look into the compiler-as-a-package design and figure out if there's a general way to specify paths to OPAM endpoints like %{bindir} as part of that.

-anil


> 
> Thomas
>> 
>>> 
>>> This could be scripted up with a fairly trivial shell script (caveat: that I
>>> haven't actually written).
>>> 
>>> -anil
>>> 
>>>> On 10 Dec 2014, at 23:12, Thomas Gazagnaire <thomas at gazagnaire.org> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> A (bad) solution is to set change OPAMROOT to an appropriate location.
>>>> 
>>>> Thanks for the write-up, this is very helpful to understand the use-cases. I've created https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues/1895 to track that.
>>>> 
>>>> Best,
>>>> Thomas
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On 10 Dec 2014, at 13:16, Simon Cruanes <simon.cruanes.2007 at m4x.org> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Hello,
>>>>> 
>>>>> Is there a blessed way to install packages system-wide using Opam? I
>>>>> suspect there isn't, so I attached a document [1] that describes my
>>>>> use-cases and what I'm thinking of (of course I know you opam
>>>>> developers are busy).
>>>>> 
>>>>> Thanks!
>>>>> 
>>>>> Best,
>>>>> 
>>>>> -- 
>>>>> Simon
>>>>> 
>>>>> [1] http://cedeela.fr/~simon/files/opam_system.html
>>>>> or joined file
>>>>> 
>>>>> http://weusepgp.info/
>>>>> key 49AA62B6, fingerprint 949F EB87 8F06 59C6 D7D3  7D8D 4AC0 1D08 49AA 62B6
>>>>> <opam_system.md>_______________________________________________
>>>>> opam-devel mailing list
>>>>> opam-devel at lists.ocaml.org
>>>>> http://lists.ocaml.org/listinfo/opam-devel
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> opam-devel mailing list
>>>> opam-devel at lists.ocaml.org
>>>> http://lists.ocaml.org/listinfo/opam-devel
>>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>