[Demexp-dev] Depencies of ocaml-gettext and other problems

[GISQUET Christophe]

Hello,

to quote myself:
>  the number of dependencies is ludicrous

While those dependencies are unavoidable, one has to waver through various 
intricates problems:

1) camomile, if I remember well, uses an option containing "pack", which is 
not supported by 3.08 versions, incidentally the one packaged for cygwin. In 
addition, one may end up being gratified with "'stuff1' and 'stuff2' disagree 
on 'some' interface", which is a another convoluted way of giving the 
convoluted explanation "incompatible ABIs somewhere". This means that for all 
packages having this problem, one must rebuild them with the 3.09 version one 
would have recompiled. That hurts, doctor.

1') Funny thing (and of no use to this list), some packages have:
- a build-dir option specifying where *all* files will be put
- make performs the bytecode build/native build/installation in one step into 
the given folder
- make clean wipes this directory...
So, if, for some reason, like incompatible APIs, you think of doing a make 
clean, don't complain to the doctor that specifying $HOME or the 
world-writable /usr hurts.

2) Most links from the configure are broken
For instance links starting with http://webperso.easyconnect.fr/gildor are now 
hosted at http://www.gallu.homelinux.org/projects.html
Then, some may have interface problems or not (see a mail on this very list 
involving TyRec), leading to "where are the *latest* versions?". The only 
place I found for some of them was the svn view interface from above, as 
there's no obvious way to access the svn server...
Last but not least, cameleon is an huge unneeded chunk. Again some time taken 
to find the original config_file 0.1 version.

> the DemexpGettext module does let dir = None (equivalent to
> $prefix/share/locale ?) which I suspect won't work under windows
3) locale directory
I suggest having demexpGettext.ml.nw to have something like:
      let dir          =
        if Sys.os_type <> "Win32" then None
        else Some "locale"
I'm not even sure it actually works, but at least someone knowledgeable can 
fix that. I suspect None to be resolved as $prefix/share/locale, which won't 
work under win32. My win32 proposal is also unsatisfying because this relative 
path requires that demexp be launched from its installation folder (win32 
shortcuts do support that).

> I couldn't understand how to simply build the .mo files
4) Building .mo files
What's the proper target to generate them when only building the client?
In addition, an ocaml-gettext limitation requires that those files are 
filtered. perl is used; couldn't the lighter, installed by default, sed do the 
job?

That's so far what I can report.

Best regards,
--
Christophe GISQUET