[opam-devel] How to manage a package manager (Was: Re: [opam] Build clarification (#1149))

[Daniel Bünzli]

Le samedi, 1 février 2014 à 19:27, Fabrice Le Fessant a écrit :
> Let's dream a little: in my ideal world, there would be an OPAM
> _bytecode_ binary in the opam-repository, always the lattest stable
> version, and able to upgrade whatever version I have of the
> opam-repository to the lattest version. Everytime I would do "opam
> update", OPAM would first check that binary, download it if needed and
> run it instead of itself (using the same trick as done by ocp-build
> bytecode to be run on any system), upgrading the repo if needed, and
> then do the update. The update would be almost completely transparent
> (maybe OPAM would ask the user to authorize the update, since the user
> has to trust a binary).

That seems a little bit overkill no ? And I don't like these binaries.  

Here's what my naivety says. Why not just have the latest version written in a text file you can GET e.g. at http://opam.ocaml.org/latest-version and on `opam update` check that url too. If there's a mismatch between the user's version and the one in http://opam.ocaml.org/latest-version propose to automatically upgrade by downloading the latest tarball in /tmp configure build and install (at the same previous location opam used to be).

That's actually exactly what I do manually these days, except I get the latest version announce from a mailing list rather than from http://opam.ocaml.org/latest-version.  

Best,

Daniel