Re: [Mldonkey-users] OCaml patch / Debian packages / etc

[Jérôme Marant]

MLdonkey <address@hidden> writes:

> Two remarks:
>
> - The patch is really simple, it doesn't change the behavior of the
> Ocaml compiler when this compiler is called without the options added
> by the patch. This can be easily checked by looking at the patch,
> which is very short. If the debian Ocaml compiler has already some
> patches applied (like Mandrake and Redhat distribs), maybe the
> mldonkey patch could be also applied by the maintainer ?

  AFAIK, the configure script checks for the features from the patch,
  and it fails when it cannot find them.
  In order to get rid of the use of the patch, one must modify
  the configure.in file, which is a very bad packaging pratice.

  Patching the OCaml compiler in order to integrate bugfixes in
  the packaging is fine and the right thing to do, but patching
  the OCaml compiler with new features without reporting the
  patch to the mainstream (from the packaging side), is a very
  bad pratice because you don't know who is responsible for bugs
  in the compiler. I'm not surprised that RedHat and Mandrake are
  doing so. 

>
> - I will ask the Ocaml team if they can apply the patch to the
> standard Ocaml distribution; at least, it gives the ability to load and save
> intermediate compiled code, which can be of interest for them for
> compilation tests. Anyway, the new release 3.05 (probably for next
> week) will not contain the patch.
>
> Finally, a solution for the autobuilder process, at least temporarily, could
> be to both add an ocaml-patched-and-renamed package and the mldonkey
> package to the Debian autobuilder.

  Adding a new package because it is required by only one package does
  not seem sane to me.

  Regards,
 
-- 
Jérôme Marant

http://marant.org