Re: Preparing for ocaml 4.11

"Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones(a)redhat.com&gt; writes: Thanks for bringing this up Rich, I was actually thinking about this for quite a while now after getting involved in OCaml packaging a bit. I would suggest the following: we introduce a new Provides for ocaml packages: Opam($pkg-name) = 1.2.3 I would propose that the ocaml provides generator takes care of adding this to the devel package. This shouldn't be really hard to pull off, it would just need to find the opam file and grep for the version. %generate_buildrequires could be used to parse the opam file from the tarball and extract the dependent opam packages from the depends: array. E.g. the following: --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- depends: [ "ocaml" {>= "4.04.2"} "base" {>= "v0.13" & < "v0.14"} "dune" {>= "1.5.1"} ] --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- would translate to: --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- BuildRequires: Opam(ocaml) >= 4.04.2 BuildRequires: Opam(base) >= 0.13 and Opam(base) < 0.14 BuildRequires: Opam(dune) >= 1.5.1 --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- The hypothetical opam2spec would be certainly also a huge improvement, as I think that most ocaml packages could be completely autogenerated. But as you already said, the devil is most likely in the details, so maybe we should start collecting ideas and potential pitfalls first? I have therefore also cc'd Olaf, who takes care of Ocaml in openSUSE. I would hope that we can coordinate our efforts, as Olaf has some pretty nice ocaml macros that automatically generate file lists for the subpackages (thereby already simplifying packaging quite a bit). And at last I'd like to throw in a (probably quite controversial) idea: how about we move ocaml into a module? Not to be able to have multiple ocaml versions as streams, but so that we can use MBS to automatically untangle the bootstrap loops for us. I was totally not aware of this feature of MBS, but it was mentioned by Stephen in this email: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.o... So, what do you think about all this? Cheers, Dan