[wg-windows] OPAM on Native Windows - Status update

[David Allsopp]

As previously mentioned, I've been devoting a little time to porting the
master branch of OPAM to work on native Windows (i.e. in a Command or
PowerShell Prompt rather than in Cygwin).

I had the chance to sync with a few people in Cambridge at the end of
August, and as a result a few of us had a presentation/discussion at
Microsoft Research Cambridge yesterday about the work I've done so far and
what still needs doing. The (PDF) slides from my talk are available at
http://1drv.ms/1QeD746

I refer in the slides to various things where Proof-of-Concept (PoC) work
has been done, and I've now shared these on GitHub at
https://github.com/dra27/opam-experiments

I mention at the end that the port is not particularly exciting at this
stage, as you can only get as far as a not terribly polished opam init. My
plan is by mid-October to have opam config env working so that we have a
very, very pre-alpha "release" which may be able to install some packages
into the system switch only.

Anyone is of course welcome to try building what's on the windows branch in
the meantime, and I'm very happy to provide assistance/receive bug reports
on the build process so far. There's documentation on the detailed
requirements for the build environment in README.md (see
https://github.com/dra27/opam/blob/windows/README.md#compiling-on-native-win
dows)

I have also shared my OneNote scribblings and notes on the port at
http://1drv.ms/1QeDkV0 (opens in OneNote Online). Please be aware that this
document contains paged-out portions of my brain, which is both a
highly-disorganised place and also sometimes expresses opinions more
strongly than are necessary!

Continuing towards the OCaml/OPAM Windows Dream...


David