One year ago, OCamlCore has started a project to help creating a fully featured build system: OCamlAutobuild.
This system is designed to help upstream developers to standardize their build system around a few entry points that can be re-used by packaging system. It doesn’t create yet another build system but just provide a way to use one already existing — applying a standard to call it.
On Friday, 4th December 2009, OCamlCore was at the annual Caml Consortium meeting and gave a talk about OCamlAutobuild. Packaging issues was discussed before within the consortium and OCamlCore wanted to show the progress of its own project.
The conclusion of this presentation was:
- Its name is too close to “automake”, which some people consider as old and full of black magic;
- Will it really ease the work of packagers ?
The solution of the first point is to rename the project to “OASIS”. This is derived from the name of the central file used for OCamlAutobuild: _oasis.
The second point is more difficult to answer. We are planning to be able to produce GODIVA files by translating _oasis files. Using a plugin such as “StdFiles” we can meet the policy of GODIVA concerning upstream package (a script called configure, make all and make opt). However, GODIVA can only handle a subset of what GODI can process. This is a restriction but hopefully this will still help GODI maintainers.
Concerning cooperation with other packagers such as Debian and Fedora, I think we will only check that data from _oasis and from the packaging system are almost synchronized. For example, we will check that build depends in “debian/control” is enough to fulfill build depends in _oasis.
OASIS supports now OCamlbuild by default and is planning support for OCamlMakefile and OMake.
More informations:
Related projects: