[opam-devel] [NEW] OCaml oasis and Janestreet Core and Async

[Kenneth Westerback]

On 11 October 2014 09:09, Anil Madhavapeddy <anil at recoil.org> wrote:
> On 10 Oct 2014, at 11:48, Kenneth Westerback <kwesterback at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 10 October 2014 14:46, Kenneth Westerback <kwesterback at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 10 October 2014 13:03, Christopher Zimmermann <christopher at gmerlin.de> wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> attached you find many new OCaml ports. Mainly the following two and
>>>> their dependencies:
>>>>
>>>> * Oasis (an OCaml project build and metadata tool) used by many of our
>>>>  OCaml ports.
>>>>
>>>> * Janestreet Core standard library overlay and Janestreet Async
>>>>
>>>> Oasis depends on devel/janestreet/ocaml-type_conv while most of
>>>> janestreet stuff uses oasis. If this is too much, I could leave the rest
>>>> of janestreet for now and only import ocaml-type_conv.
>>>>
>>>> Since I'm currently waiting for the release of OPAM 1.2
>>>> (https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip/tree/master/sysutils/opam),
>>>> which can be used to install all those libraries and binaries, I'm
>>>> wondering whether it still makes any sense to maintain those ports in
>>>> our ports tree. The same applies to other ports already in our tree
>>>> like devel/{utop,ocaml-lambda-term,ocaml-lwt} ...). Opinions? OKs?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Christopher
>>>
>>> Personally I would prefer to use opam over ports. The only reason I
>>> can see for maintaining ports is if they are needed to build other
>>> ocaml ports (mldonkey?) in the tree. That's my 0.05C (Canada has
>>> eliminated the penny).
>>>
>>> .... Ken
>>
>> I guess we would also need a port when upstream needs patches to
>> compile on OpenBSD. Hopefully a rare situation going forward.
>
> I'm happy to merge OpenBSD-specific fixes into OPAM -- it's possible to
> add OS-specific selectors in the patches field to not affect other OSes.
>
> However, it is very convenient to be able to depend on a binary
> installation of OCaml libraries for end-user applications, particularly
> given the strict versioning requirements.  The OpenBSD port is also
> higher quality when it comes to architecture portability, since it
> separates out bytecode vs native code vs native dynlinking architectures.
>
> There is enough metadata available in an OPAM package to generate a
> snapshot of OpenBSD ports from a given package set.  I'm not suggesting
> we automatically import the results into OpenBSD, but it would really
> help keep the ports tree in sync with the latest versions of libraries.
> The metadata needed for this is roughly:
>
> - build instructions -- present in OPAM, but they do not separate out
>   fake installation and native code at the moment.  This could be added
>   to OPAM fairly easily.
>
> - external dependencies -- OPAM has a 'depexts' field where OS packages
>   can be specified.  This is a free-form field, so it could be a precise
>   pkgspec for the OpenBSD entry.
>
> - categories and homepages -- these can be lifted straight out of the
>   OPAM spec, and tags can be used to map OpenBSD-specific information.
>
> More broadly though, does any other language-specific packaging system
> do this at the moment, or all ports maintained manually?
>
> -anil

IANA porter, so I speak only from a user perspective. And I don't use
any perl ports so I don't know if they represent all perl ports used
on OpenBSD or just those needed OpenBSD specific tweaks.

If there are OpenBSD specific patches needed then I think a port is
the way to go. I'd hate to have a lot of info kept in opam only to
find Oxford has kidnapped Anil on boat race night and is demanding the
OpenBSD Ocaml community cough up. :-)

I currently have no idea how many OpenBSD patches are needed. The
couple I found while playing with getting core_extended working were
fixed by OpenBSD commits or are in queue to get fixed in core_extended
(right, Anil?). The other packages I needed/wanted to try all worked
from the wip opam 1.2 port.

My two minor concerns are 1) making sure RWO readers find OpenBSD a
congenial place to follow along, and 2) making sure that opam and
ports can co-exist if opam is available on OpenBSD.

In regards to 2), I encountered confusion when I had utop port
installed and then also blithely installed it with opam. Not to say it
is certain that I didn't screw up something just on my system, but the
relations between the two should be well known/easily discovered.

.... Ken