[opam-devel] Fwd: OPAM on fedora

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

See below for Gabriel's message to the Fedora list.  Gabriel: thanks for kicking this off! I would appreciate being CCed in on this (or better, opam-devel if cross posting is ok), as I maintain the semi-official OPAM Fedora packages right now that point people to the OBS service.

In the interests of sanity, I'd rather not have two divergent sets of instructions for Coq users and the general OPAM population, so if we switch to Copr, then the official OPAM instructions should also switch.  In the longer term, the packages will get into Fedora and everything will be fine, but don't forget that in the medium term that the Yum remotes will remain on people's computers for some time, and there's significant confusion in mixing up OBS and Copr packages.

For Coq users right now, I think it's wiser to point them to the OPAM web pages which in turn point to my OBS repositories, rather than pointing them to Jon's.  The reason is that mine are better tested, but they also use the bundled OCaml packages, whereas Jon's are upstream-friendly and break out the OPAM dependencies.  There have been bugs from doing this in the past (e.g. with a libdose3 mismatch), so it's best to let this settle down upstream before pointing a large user base at a Copr remote that may still be a moving target.

-Anil

> 
>> From: Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer at gmail.com <mailto:gabriel.scherer at gmail.com>>
>> Date: 24 January 2015 11:14:39 GMT
>> To: <jonathan.ludlam at citrix.com <mailto:jonathan.ludlam at citrix.com>>, Scott Logan <logans at cottsay.net <mailto:logans at cottsay.net>>, <ocaml-devel at lists.fedoraproject.org <mailto:ocaml-devel at lists.fedoraproject.org>>
>> Subject: OPAM on fedora
>> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I would like to update the page listing the state of OPAM packaging on Unix distributions
>>   https://github.com/ocaml/opam/wiki/Distributions <https://github.com/ocaml/opam/wiki/Distributions>
>> with information for Fedora -- which is the distribution I'm using right now.
>> 
>> As far as I understand:
>>   - neither opam nor aspcud are currently available as Fedora packages
>>   - there are separate copr repositories that work well in practice:
>>     opam: https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/jonludlam/opam/builds/ <https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/jonludlam/opam/builds/>
>>     aspcud: https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/cottsay/gringo/builds/ <https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/cottsay/gringo/builds/>
>> 
>> (In previous discussion with Scott Logan I installed aspcud (which is needed in practice to have a functional opam) through his packages and that worked well.)
>> 
>> Is it reasonable to advise end-users to install through the copr repositories? It seems easier than compiling from source, but the "Installation instructions" advise not to do this ( "Everybody else should avoid this repo." ). My instructions would be roughly as follows:
>>   yum copr enable jonludlam/opam
>>   yum copr enable cottsay/gringo
>>   yum install aspcud opam
>> 
>> (OPAM is the de-facto standard package managers for OCaml libraries nowadays, and should also become the package manager for the Coq proof assistant. Coq will have a new version released in the following days/weeks (8.5beta1), so I'm reviewing the installation procedure.)

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