[wg-windows] Improving the state of OCaml on Windows

[Thomas Braibant]

Hi,

Thanks for joining this working group. Its goal is to find out how to
improve the state of OCaml and its ecosystem on Windows.

Some of the tasks that we might address (this list is by no mean meant to
be exhaustive nor normative):

- Gather information from the community  about the use of the various
versions of OCaml available on Windows, and understand what kind of
environment people are working with. (BTW, I think a good way to get the
discussion rolling might be to describe each other's setup to use OCaml on
Windows.)

- Finalize OPAM support for Windows (this is listed on the OPAM 1.3
roadmap). When this support is in place, many OCaml packages should work
out of the box (with the proviso that many packages assume a unix-ish
environment for their build system).

- Discuss how to help package developers improve Windows support. One way
to do that could be to provide know-how about how to setup continuous
integration on services like Appveyor to check that packages build on
typical Windows setups.

- Find a solution for users of WODI, the GODI based OCaml distribution for
Windows, which has been shutdown. WODI was able to compile OCaml related
software (using Cygwin as an environment), but was also able to install
binary packages. (In some cases, some non-trivial patches  were applied to
make package usable on Windows.) Some of the sources needed to use WODI are
still available, but the system does not work out of the box now that the
server has gone offline. With a little work, we might be able to bring it
back, to smooth the transition.

- Discuss the state of cross compilation to Windows.

- Advertise OCamlPro's OCPWin commercial effort. (I will leave Fabrice tell
a bit more about that.)

- Discuss how to pool resources (if needed) to work toward these goals.

Many thanks to Anil and OcamlLabs for hosting this mailing list.

Thomas
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