Packaging MLGMPIDL

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Fri Mar 13 09:14:19 UTC 2009


On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 09:14:22AM -0400, Alan Dunn wrote:
> Something I thought I would address to the Fedora OCaml experts:
> 
> I want to package MLGMPIDL -
> http://www.inrialpes.fr/pop-art/people/bjeannet/mlxxxidl-forge/mlgmpidl/index.html
> - (it's a dependency for something else I want to package, in case
> anyone is interested my path is MLGMPIDL -> APRON -> Frama-C). It

Excellent, I need Frama-C too ...

> links to C code in a static library and produces OCaml native code and
> bytecode libraries. What is the ideal way to package this? The
> packaging guidelines state that I should try not to ship a static C
> library if possible, but from what I understand (which may well be
> wrong, so please correct me if needed) even with the latest OCaml,
> bytecode and native code just don't mix, and there's no way to load a
> shared C library from native code. Thus it seems that to ship native
> and bytecode versions of the library, I need to ship the static
> library anyway, so I should just use this for both versions
> (separating it out into a -static package too?) Furthermore, even if
> there is a way to do something great with OCaml 3.11, this isn't
> available for Fedora 9 and 10 (and at least 10 will be around for a
> while longer)...

I don't think there will be a problem.  The prohibition against static
linking seems to apply mainly to "proper" libraries, not to small C
libraries which are essentially internal/runtime (for example:
libgcc.a).

> If someone doesn't mind, if there's a definitive guide to exactly what
> can and cannot be done with respect to native, bytecode, and external
> C library linking and how this varies over OCaml version it would be
> much appreciated - the information on this out there is tough for me
> to parse, it seems to be in bits and pieces all over the place.

Best thing here I think is to make a package & review request and then
we can look at the issues (if any) during review.

Rich.

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