Bug#500959: Caml-core is bloated
Hi Zack!
>> This package is called ocaml-core, and hence I expected it to install
>> a reasonably complete O'Caml environment.
> That's the purpose, yes.
>> Depends: ocaml, ocaml-best-compilers, ocaml-findlib, ocaml-tools, camlidl, ocamlweb, libounit-ocaml-dev, cameleon, ocamldsort, ledit, otags
>> At least half of these should not be pulled in by ocaml-core, there
>> should be an ocaml-full package that pulls them in. Particularly
>> annoying is ocamlweb, which by default pulls in a very large LaTeX
>> installation.
> - ledit: can be relaxed using alternatives over other line-editing
> tools available in debian
It should be a Recommends or a Suggests.
> - cameleon: should stay, it is the only IDE we have (beside Emacs, but
> I don't want to force users to use it)
This is caml-core, the /core/ Caml package. The one that contains all
the tools that you believe the average Caml developer cannot live
without, not everything you feel is useful for Caml development.
Caml-core should suggest Cameleon, but not depend on it. It is
reasonable for caml-full to depend on Cameleon.
By the way, Cameleon itself is bloated. It depends on ocaml-report,
ocaml-dbforge, and while we're at it, libcameleon-ocaml-dev. Note
that all of these are Depends, not Suggests, not even Recommends.
> - otags: should stay, especially because it provides system-wide tags
> for the standard library
Recommends feels reasonable to me.
> Question open to suggestions: now that Recommends are installed by
> default, should maybe all the Depends of ocaml-core be demoted to
> Recommends?
Most of them. I believe it should Depend on the bytecode compiler and
the toplevel, Recommend ledit, otags and the native compiler, and
Suggest the rest. I'm fine with Recommends (I can easily override
them), I'm definitely not okay with Depends.
> Summarizing: what else do you want to be removed from ocaml-core?
Let me explain. I'm currently building a Debian Live-CD for our
first-year students. I want the Live-CD to be usable for Caml
development, but since we only use Caml in third year, Caml is not the
main purpose of the Live-CD (Java and C are). I want a simple way to
install a reasonably minimal Caml environment, without installing 300 MB
of TeX packages.
If these are Recommends, I can easily override your choices when
building the Live-CD. If these are Depends, I need to --force-depends
all over the place, which is error-prone and unclean.
See you,
Juliusz
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