On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 6:38 PM, Michael <michip...@gmail.com> wrote: > I am curious about how to > take advantage of OPAM for maintaining OCaml related ports.
Actually, I have been also pondering this for a while already... :-) > The ideal > thing would be to have a `opam make-freebsd-port OPAMPACKAGE' subcommand > that would prepare a nice Makefile, pkg-descr, pkg-plist traid, ready to > plug in the ports hierarchy. OPAM looks quite independent and standalone to me: it maintains a separate directory (called ".opam") for its own files and does everything (stores tarballs, package database, repository indexes, state information, installed compilers, and such) there. I am not sure we could plug the FreeBSD Port Collection into this ecosystem, especially that OPAM can remove packages without much fuss (in contrast to Haskell Cabal, for example). > There is other language specific package managers—maybe Ruby GEMS and > Python EGGS, for instance—but I am not aware of how they interact with > the port system. Well, up to to my humble knowledge, only the Perl ports implement some way of integration with the Ports Collection, dubbed "BSDPAN" [1]. For the Haskell Cabal packages, ports are mostly geared towards providing proper removal, working around large build times, warranting that the given package builds fine on FreeBSD (especially with the components of the latest Haskell Platform), and pull in external dependencies when needed (for bindings, mostly). For what it is worth, an OPAM repository [2] is much like the ports tree but without Makefiles and with multiple versions of the same package and also stores compiler toolchains. The OPAM package description supports running on multiple platforms (i.e. can abstract away from differences like "make" versus "gmake") and allows to add patches to fix things in the source tarball. It can also get the sources directly from a git repository, and can manage overlapping multiple repositories, can stick packages to certain versions... In summary, I have a vague feeling that OPAM-managed packages can be maintained quite well without the help of the FreeBSD Ports Collection. We may want to offer pre-built FreeBSD binaries for some of the leaf ports (e.g. net/unison), though. [1] http://bit.ly/Jm8v20 [2] https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam-repository _______________________________________________ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
