OCamlCore, with support from the OCaml enthusiasts at Jane Street, is working on creating OASIS-DB, a CPAN for OCaml. The goals of OASIS-DB are to reduce the paperwork required to release and update an OCaml package, and to provide integrated management of library dependencies.
OASIS-DB is also intended to help packagers for a variety of systems, including Debian, Fedora, GODI and others, by:
- providing consistent metadata: description, synopsis, build dependencies
- displaying version number of packages in each distribution
- displaying available patches
In addition, we hope to ease integration with GODI by publishing packages using an alternative GODI repository, when translation of the _oasis file with GODIVA is possible. It will also integrate with other indices of OCaml packages, like the OCaml LinkDB and the OCaml Hump.
The project is almost a pure OCaml project. It uses ocsigen for its website and processes _oasis file in an uploaded tarball to publish a package. The project is in fact a sub-project of the OASIS project and reuses user information provided for this tool.
We hope that this project will provide the OCaml community with a great tool to manage a growing number of small libraries. Don’t hesitate to comment on our technical specifications, if you think we’re missing something.
This project will cover what was named "bocage" and "OASIS self-contained" during the OASIS presentation at OCaml Meeting 2010.