Re: 0install as an OCaml package manager

On 5 December 2016 at 22:06, Yawar Amin <[email protected]> wrote:
> Apologies if this has been discussed before, but it's rather hard to search
> for. Has there been any thought given towards using 0install as an
> alternative package manager to OPAM? If not, can anyone shed any light on
> what it would take, at a minimum, to start with 0install and
> ocamlc/ocamlbuild, and end up with OCaml package management?

The main problem is that OCaml library binaries are only compatible
with the exact versions of the libraries they are compiled against.

e.g. if you compile cohttp 0.21.0 against uri 1.8.0 then the resulting
cohttp binary isn't usable if you want to compile a program with
cohttp 0.21.0 but with uri 1.9.0.

So, you'd need to get 0compile to add extra constraints to the
generated feeds. You also need to decide when to drop binaries from
the cache. e.g. do you want to keep both cohttp-0.21.0+uri-1.8.0 and
cohttp-0.21.0+uri-1.9.0? You can easily end up with a lot of
combinations. opam only keeps one binary for each package, but that
has its own problems.


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