[arch-dev-public] [arch-dev] State of OCaml-Update (stuck by deprecation of camlp4)

Eli Schwartz eschwartz at archlinux.org
Tue Aug 6 19:22:08 UTC 2019


On 8/6/19 1:21 PM, Jürgen Hötzel wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Unfortunately it is not possible to compile camlp4 with OCaml >= 4.08.
> 
> But some well known packages depend on this preprocessor. E.g. :Haxe,
> lablgtk2 (therefore also: Unison and Coq).
> 
> I don't see that these projects will be migrated to camlp5 or ppx in the
> near future. Therefore there are only 2 options from my point of view:
> 
> 1. OCaml-4.07 and Ocaml >= 4.08 in [EXTRA].
> 2. removal of Haxe, lablgtk2, Unison and Coq.
> 
> I prefer 1. What do you think?
> 
> Same issue discussed on Debian Bug Tracker:
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=933722

According to https://github.com/garrigue/lablgtk/pull/67 lablgtk2 only
needs camlp4 to generate some source distribution files which upstream
indicates they distribute, so hopefully it can be built without that
makedepends and against newer ocaml?

According to https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe, haxe alreeady
migrated to camlp5 in git master.

BTW in addition to haxe and lablgtk2, there is also lablgl, which I need
for llpp -- but I don't really know ocaml as a programming language so I
don't know if that can be easily migrated to something new; also, it
seems to be kind of "feature frozen" (read: dead).

llpp also has a makedepends on camlp4 but that's an accident, so I fixed
it in svn trunk.

If swig really needs camlp4 for its check function, we can probably just
disable that testsuite component instead of holding back the whole repo.

...

So the only blocker would seem to be lablgl, which is my package used as
a makedepends for one other package. Again, I don't really know much
about ocaml, but it *seems* like changing the makedepends to camlp5 and
using the following sed line in prepare() lets it successfully build:

    sed -i 's/camlp4/camlp5/g' \
        LablGlut/src/Makefile \
        Togl/src/Makefile \
        src/Makefile


Would love some confirmation if this is right.

Given all these facts, it seems quite feasible to update ocaml, if not
today then soon.

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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