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

[MLdonkey]

>    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.

Of course, version 1.16 was not designed to be used without the
patch. Newer versions from CVS can compile without the patch, but
then, without eDonkey support.

>    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. 

Right. It was just a proposal to prevent adding a new package for the
ocaml-patched only used by mldonkey.

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

Well, maybe you should also remove packages from the Debian distrib
that are used by nobody ? I found that one package requiring it could
be enough. Moreover, only a patched 'ocamlopt/ocamlopt.opt' compiler
is required, there is no need for all the other libraries of Ocaml,
since they can be found in the standard distribution.

Cheers,

- MLDonkey