chambart / js-build-tools

Jane Street Build Tools

This repository contains a few helpers that are used to build Jane Street packages.

opam2oasis_install

This is a small library that we use to generate opam .install files from the setup.log file generated by oasis.

We don't use oasis for installing files as it is hard to change the destination directory dynamically; you need to fiddle with ocamlfind variables and a few other things. On the contrary opam-installer is very convenient for that.

To use it you need to create a small OCaml script and invoke it after a successful compilation. You can look at any Jane Street package to see an example of use. We always name this script install.ml and use these rules in our makefiles:

SETUP := setup.exe
NAME := core_kernel
PREFIX = $(shell grep ^prefix= setup.data | cut -d\" -f 2)

build: $(SETUP) setup.data
	./$(SETUP) -build $(BUILDFLAGS)
	$(MAKE) $(NAME).install

$(NAME).install: install.ml setup.log setup.data
	ocaml -I "$(OCAML_TOPLEVEL_PATH)" install.ml

install: $(NAME).install
	opam-installer -i --prefix $(PREFIX) $(NAME).install

uninstall: $(NAME).install
	opam-installer -u --prefix $(PREFIX) $(NAME).install

For instance here is the install.ml file for core_kernel:

#use "topfind";;
#require "js-build-tools.oasis2opam_install";;

open Oasis2opam_install;;

generate ~package:"core_kernel"
  [ oasis_lib "core_kernel"
  ; file "META" ~section:"lib"
  ; file "include/core_params.h" ~section:"lib"
  ; file "include/jane_common.h" ~section:"lib"
  ; file "include/ocaml_utils.h" ~section:"lib"
  ; file "include/unix_utils.h" ~section:"lib"
  ; file "src/time_ns_stubs.h" ~section:"lib"
  ; file "_build/namespace_wrappers/result_lib.cmi" ~section:"lib"
  ]

To see what you can use, you can look at the API.

js-build-tools.ocamlbuild_goodies

This is an ocamlbuild plugin containing several hacks and utilities that we often need.

The most interesting bit is track_external_deps, it setup things so that ocamlbuild tracks ocamlfind packages. For instance you are working on two packages a and b simultaneously and b depends on a, whenever you reinstall a you would normally need to do make clean in b. With this plugin you don't need to, ocamlbuild will properly rebuild things in b if needed.