[opam-devel] [MirageOS-devel] Offline use of mirage?

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

On 14 Feb 2014, at 15:55, Amir Chaudhry <amc79 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hi folks,
> 
> I (perhaps foolishly) thought I could play with mirage-skeleton on the train today and made sure to update repos and packages.  Just now had a facepalm moment when I saw 'Installing OPAM packages' in the terminal while trying out the static_website stuff. 
> 
> Is there an easy way I can keep a local copy of all the things I might need? I get the feeling that opam-in-box (and a way to keep it up-to-date)  is what I'm after.
> 
> I'm just trying to figure out if I missed an obvious solution so if this isn't possible yet, that's fine. 

Mort made the same request recently as well.  It's possible to do this by using "opam-admin make" to build a local version of the repository and using that as your remote.

For this to work, though, we'll need to come up with a list of all the packages that will be needed to pass to `opam-admin make`.  I notice that "opam-admin make --help" tells me this:

       -r, --recursive
           Recurse among the transitive dependencies.

       --resolve
           A more advanced version of `--recursive': will attempt to resolve
           your installation with all dependencies in the best way possible
           and build the archives accordingly.

CCing opam-devel: what on earth does the latter entry mean? :-)  What's the downside of using --resolve for everything instead of -r?  If there's none, why not get rid of -r entirely?

-anil