On Mon, 3 Mar 2014 05:53:23 -0800, Daniel Bünzli wrote:
> 
> People should move to use opam files rather than _oasis files to
> keep their metadata. For one thing if you put it at the root
> directory of your distribution it provides you first class support
> for pining packages which is bloody useful for testing fixes and
> making preleases.

I disagree.  For example, several of my comments concerned libraries
that were no longer useful for the compilation of the project but that
were left as dependencies in opam.  Thus the dependencies should be
extracted from the build system.  oasis2opam could easily generate a
local opam file so it costs no work at all.  But, as I said, you have
to keep opam aware of the libraries you use — an information already
present in your build system — or the executables you want to install
— also already in your build system.  Experience shows that, even for
simple projects, it is likely that the two get out of sync at some
point.

> Frankly the _oasis way of doing things seems a technical dead-end to
> me, all these useless and slow layers of indirection,

Frankly, oasis takes very few percent of compilation time.  ocamlbuild
may be the culprit if your compilation is slow.

> generating files you semi-understand and that people commit to their
> repos results

This used to be the case but it is not anymore (since a while).  You
can use the dynamic mode while developing (and so you do not commit
"ugly files") and generate files independent of oasis when creating
the tarball.  You would get the same thing if you wanted, say, a build
system that does not require make to be installed.

> It had its use at certain point, but now that opam is firmly in the
> equation and given the way it works, having a meta system to
> generate generate build systems (well I think it still only supports
> ocamlbuild) you don't understand seems a moot point to me. It's a
> piece of bureaucracy I find hard to see any value in it.

As you know, not only does oasis drive the build system, it can also
generate opam, META files,...  It should likely be the easier to port
to Windows.  Nobody says it is perfect but it handles the bureaucracy
of other tools.