[cwn] Attn: Development Editor, Latest Caml Weekly News
Alan Schmitt
alan.schmitt at polytechnique.org
Tue Jun 4 06:16:41 PDT 2013
Hello,
Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of May 28 to June 04, 2013.
1) OPAM and packaging
2) ~/.opam design
3) opam packages wrapped inside a spec file
4) A modern meta programming system for OCaml
5) Interfacing with QtQuick 2.0 from Qt5, RFC
6) Ocamlnet-3.6.4
7) automatic extaction of the .mli (and a little more) from the .ml
8) Other Caml News
========================================================================
1) OPAM and packaging
Archive: <https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2013-05/msg00145.html>
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** Very deep in this thread, Chet Murthy said and Christophe Troestler replied:
> OK. A little more. OPAM is already a tremendous improvement. But to
> really make it possible to build -systems- in Ocaml, you have to be
> able to distribute collections of programs, config, and libraries,
> across multiple (admittedly identical) machines. And distribute
> updates to same. OPAM is in some ways like BSD ports -- it works
> great for maintaining single machines from source-code.
>
> But what's needed is a way to maintain -many- machines, and to
> distribute updates in a granular manner that be -managed- -- rolled
> forward, rolled back, with full knowledge of which versions of which
> packages are being installed. And everything with -zero- version
> skew. So any nondeterminism happened at buiild-time -- by
> deploy-time, all machines are getting identical files with identical
> timestamps.
>
> It's a tall order, b/c OPAM will need to figure out how to capture
> enough of the environment (in order to check it on the target machine
> where a binary is installed) to verify whether it's safe to install
> that binary. But boy would it be nice.
>
> And as a bonus, we could wrapper opam in the debian apparatus (I
> think) and get a really nice way to turn opam packages into debian
> packages.
Those interested in that should help Sylvain to develop oasis2debian¹
and other helpers. Oasis has rich metadata and can be the "root" from
which packages are created (there is also oasis2opam² which usually
performs a better job than humans ;-) ).
¹ <https://github.com/ocaml/oasis2debian>
² <https://github.com/ocaml/oasis2opam>
** Thomas Gazagnaire then added:
We are indeed in the process of experimenting with that idea (see [1]).
Nothing is ready yet, but that's definitely something we are interested in.
The hard part is (as always) to keep track of the correct external
dependencies (such as the available shared C libraries available at the time
of build). A good first approximation is to say that the external
dependencies never change, but that's obviously not very safe to rely on that
assumption too much, so we are thinking of keeping track of the result given
by ldd as well.
[1] <https://github.com/venator/opam/blob/binary/src/core/opamBinary.ml>
========================================================================
2) ~/.opam design
Archive: <https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2013-05/msg00242.html>
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** Sébastien Dailly asked and Thomas Gazagnaire replied:
> Maybe is the subject now closed, and I'm answering too late, but I'll
> greatly appreciate if opam could follow the XDG Directory design[1] :
>
> $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/opam (default ~/.config/opam) for the configuration
> $XDG_DATA_HOME/opam (default ~/.local/opam) for the package and all datas
>
> This allow to stop the polution in the users ~ , and give the user a way to
> define it's own path.
>
> [1] <http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html>
The subject is not closed at all, and we might move in this direction in
future releases of OPAM. See for instance [1]
The current design has a lot of advantages (the main one being that you can
remove your ~/.opam if you want restart from scratch) and it can be tweaked
to have a global installation (see [2,3], even if the tweak is not very well
documented). But yes, for some configurations (such as shared NFS homedirs),
the current situation is not perfect and it would be nice to be able to
separate the data from the configuration bits. Luckily, all the paths used by
OPAM are defined in [4] so they can be changed without too much hassle.
[1] <https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam/issues/401>
[2] <https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam/issues/398>
[3] <https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam-repository/issues/746>
[4] <https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam/blob/master/src/core/opamPath.ml>
========================================================================
3) opam packages wrapped inside a spec file
Archive: <https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2013-05/msg00261.html>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Florent Monnier said, Francois Berenger asked, and Florent Monnier replied:
>> For fun I've played with wrapping an opam package inside a rpm package.
>> I just have to tar.gz the package directory and in the .spec file, sed
>> the archive field for a file:// path (because not allowed to get
>> something from outside) seded with the archives in the SOURCES
>> directory of the rpm package. I init Opam and repo remove the internet
>> one (again nothing from outside), then install in the path that
>> rpmbuild wants.
>> There is still one detail that won't be able to be done by a script
>> it's when there's a C lib dependency, because Opam don't provide yet
>> any feature for this. But this will probably come for 2.0. So it's
>> potentially possible to create .rpm's for all Opam packages with
>> almost no or very few human work. This kind of rpm's won't fit the
>> Mageia packaging policy though, but we could change it to allow this,
>> or put an unofficial rpm repo somewhere else.
Here is the early result of playing with this:
<http://www.linux-nantes.org/%7Efmonnier/ocaml/opam/wrap-rpm/>
you can see it's only the opam package wrapped inside a .spec file.
A more clean solution would of course to make an opam2spec script to
really create a .spec file that would look very close to a human made
.spec file. But I think that this second solution would need more
human work thant the dirty one. This second would maybe even take as
many time as if it's completely made by hand because there would be
more details to edit I think.
And the dirty wrap method has also the advantage to stay very close to
the original one.
> Will this procedure be automated?
This one seems to give an acceptable result.
(only README LICENSE and api-doc are missing)
I guess this one could be used as a template by a script for the others.
> Automatic creation of RPMs from OPAM packages.
> I am very interested by this.
need to add the homepages and licenses fields in opam files if we want
this script to be able to fill the equivalent fields of the .spec
files.
Also the C lib dependency needs to be found to add the BuildRequires fields.
Otherwise it seems that most of it can be automated.
========================================================================
4) A modern meta programming system for OCaml
Archive: <https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2013-06/msg00002.html>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Hongbo Zhang announced:
I am very happy to announce a preview of Fan (<http://bobzhang.github.io/Fan/>).
Fan is a compile-time metaprogramming system for OCaml, inspired from Camlp4,
it's a combination of OCaml and Lispy macros. It shares the same syntax with
OCaml.
There is a paper (<http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~hongboz/main.pdf>) about the
overview of Fan's architecture (Fan is evolving everyday, the paper may be a bit
out-dated :-))
Fan has a very flexible architecture, which means features are very easy to be
added. I am very happy to support the feature proposed here, especially since
it's still in pre-alpha-status.
As a pretty large software, documentation is indeed lacking, just be a little
patient, I would try to come up with some docs these days.
========================================================================
5) Interfacing with QtQuick 2.0 from Qt5, RFC
Archive: <https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2013-06/msg00007.html>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Continuing an old thread, Kakadu said:
'Hello world' tutorial have become longer and more copy-pastable. See you on
github pages: <http://kakadu.github.io/lablqt/qtquick-helloworld.html>
========================================================================
6) Ocamlnet-3.6.4
Archive: <https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2013-06/msg00010.html>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Gerd Stolpmann announced:
I've just released Ocamlnet-3.6.4. This is a maintenance release
including:
- New configure options for PCRE (-enable-full-pcre, -enable-pcre).
There is also documentation about the PCRE issue in Regexp.html
(remember that PCRE is no longer the default regexp engine).
- More documentation for Netmulticore: Netmcore_basics
- New Netplex module for mailboxes: Netplex_mbox.
- netcgi2-apache builds against apache-2.4
plus various smaller fixes and additions.
For a full description, see the ChangeLog.
Get Ocamlnet, read the manual etc. from
<http://projects.camlcity.org/projects/ocamlnet.html>
========================================================================
7) automatic extaction of the .mli (and a little more) from the .ml
Archive: <https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2013-06/msg00015.html>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Deep in this thread, Francois Berenger asked and Alain Frisch replied:
I've created a proof-of-concept implementation of such a tool as part of the
"extension_points" branch, which introduces a syntax for attributes on various
syntactic items (including type declarations and value bindings).
Note that I *don't* endorse the idea of generating .mli files automatically :-)
Here is the code:
<http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/ocaml/branches/extension_points/experimental/frisch/nomli.ml?revision=HEAD&view=markup>
and an example:
<http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/ocaml/branches/extension_points/experimental/frisch/test_nomli.ml?revision=HEAD&view=markup>
> - I think there should be tags in the .ml file as comments
> that say "export this" to the .mli.
Encoding annotations in comments is very fragile, because they are not kept by
the parser in the generated Parsetree, and it is not well-defined to which
component each component refers to. ocamldoc uses comments, and as a
consequence, it does not combine well with preprocessors (Camlp4/Camlp5/Fan/ppx
extensions cannot generate documentation fragments, and it is likely that they
break existing ones). A version of ocamldoc based on attributes of the
extension_points branch would be much more robust (and simple). I've written
another toy POC implementation of a mini-ocamldoc based on attributes:
<http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/ocaml/branches/extension_points/experimental/frisch/minidoc.ml?revision=HEAD&view=markup>
<http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/ocaml/branches/extension_points/experimental/frisch/testdoc.mli?revision=HEAD&view=markup>
(experimental/frisch/Makefile in the extenstion_point branch contains everything
to compile and run these little demos.)
** Francois Berenger then asked and Alain Frisch replied:
> - being able to assign priorities to things exported in the
> .mli file (to re-order the .mli in some way that makes it easier to
> grasp). I think floats should be used and the priority assigned
> should be shown in the .mli so that users can quickly see what
> priority they need to change in the .ml to obtain the order
> they want in the .mli
Yes, it's quite easy to add some priority information as an extra
argument to the [@mli] attribute. (That said, since extension_points is
not yet merged in the official version, I don't think it's worth
spending time on the prototype right now.)
Showing the priority in the .mli (in the form of attributes) is
straightforward (currently, the source syntax pretty-printer
pprintast.ml does not support printing attributes, but this will be fixed).
> - can you also handle the transfer of ocamldoc comments in the .ml
> to the .mli
In this form, this is very tricky, because the tool is based on the
result of the OCaml parser which does not store the ocamldoc comments.
The tool would need to steal from ocamldoc the (complex) logic required
to re-parse the source code, extract the attributes, attach them to
components of the parsetree/typedtree.
What is doable is to have the tool accept more attributes (or more
arguments to the [@mli] attribute) representing text to be used as
ocamldoc comments in the generated .mli. Instead of producing an AST
for the generated signatures (which is then pretty-printed), the tool
would directly emit the content of the .mli (with ocamldoc attributes).
> (I read later that you also have a final solution
> for ocamldoc too)?
Certainly not! I'm only suggesting that a tool similar to ocamldoc
could be based on attributes, and that it would be more robust and much
easier to implement. But designing and implementing this tool is still
a serious engineering task, and unless someone puts the required
manpower in this project, this is not going to happen.
** David Allsopp also asked and Alain Frisch replied:
> I have wondered if this problem is perhaps looked at the wrong way
> around - in other words, the complaint takes the form "how can we
> export to the .mli file automatically" rather than "how can we
> *import* from the .ml file automatically". The thing I do find
> irritating maintaining .mli/.ml files is having to type anything out
> twice - and for the most part that means fully exported type
> declarations. Say you have a simple module:
I'd rather do it the other way around: maintain the type declaration in
the .mli and import it in the .ml file.
And, guess what, there is also a POC of such a tool in the
extension_points branch. It allows you to write in the .ml file:
type t = [%copy_typedef]
to copy the concrete definition from the .mli file. This also works for
module types, and you can also import a definition from another .ml or
.mli file:
module type S = [%copy_typedef]
type loc = [%copy_typedef "../../parsing/location.mli" t]
The [%id ...] syntax is the other new syntactic feature introduced by
the extension_points branch (in addition to attributes). Contrary to
attributes which annotate already well-formed code and which can thus be
ignored by the type-checker, [%...] extensions can used in place of an
expression, type, pattern, etc, and they need to be expanded by a -ppx
rewriter.
The tool:
<http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/ocaml/branches/extension_points/experimental/frisch/copy_typedef.ml?revision=HEAD&view=markup>
And an example:
<http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/ocaml/branches/extension_points/experimental/frisch/test_copy_typedef.mli?revision=HEAD&view=markup>
<http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/ocaml/branches/extension_points/experimental/frisch/test_copy_typedef.ml?revision=HEAD&view=markup>
========================================================================
8) Other Caml News
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** From the ocamlcore planet blog:
Thanks to Alp Mestan, we now include in the Caml Weekly News the links to the
recent posts from the ocamlcore planet blog at <http://planet.ocaml.org/>.
Flowing faster: saving the cloud:
<http://scattered-thoughts.net/blog/2013/06/02/flowing-faster-saving-the-cloud/>
Flowing faster: backing up:
<http://scattered-thoughts.net/blog/2013/06/01/flowing-faster-backing-up/>
Presence at the second OCaml-Paris Meetup:
<http://gallium.inria.fr/blog/second-ocaml-paris-meetup>
========================================================================
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