Temporary OCamlbuild manual repository
This repository for the present OCamlbuild manual is an effort to replace the old manual with something that satisfies users better.
The present documentation is currently only a draft, with parts missing. Contributions are warmly welcome to evolve into a more polished and complete document.
Angles of improvement
The not-good-enough documentation is a subject that often comes up in ocamlbuild
discussions. It’s surprisingly hard to get feedback on what should be improved, but here is what I heard:
-
There are not enough short examples to reuse/tweak and forget about.
-
A clear presentation of the basic mental model of the tool is missing.
-
Writing a
myocamlbuild.ml
is frightening and little help is provided (though the former Wiki, whose content is now on ocaml.org, does answer questions).
I would add two points:
-
There is too much blatter about design philosophies that aren’t terribly helpful in the end
-
The manual doesn’t emphasize enough the combination of
ocamlbuild
andocamlfind
, as the latter tool was not a given whenocamlbuild
was designed. Choosingocamlbuild
+ocamlfind
as the default tool combination allows a simpler presentation that does more by default and skips over some less-useful features (use_foo
and + non-ocamlfind
camlp4
stuff).