Debian version of MLton

[Henry Cejtin]

Hm,  it  seems  that the mail I exchanged with Barak was not all going to the
MLton mailing list as I thought.  I have included  it  at  the  end  of  this
message.

The moral is that we are in there for the next Debian release.

I grabbed all the files from
    http://www.cs.unm.edu/~bap/debian/mlton/
but have only quickly looked through them.  I don't understand why he changed
a bunch of random files (but certainly not all of them).  All he seemed to do
was  add  a  few  lines  of  comments.   He also changed the main.tex file in
src/doc/user-guide,  but  only  in  a  way  that  I  don't  think  makes  any
difference.

The Makefiles are all a bit different.

My  conclusion  on  this is that we should just be doing this ourselves since
now the Debian version is going to be slightly different (although in  theory
not in a serious way).

>From bap@sweat.cs.unm.edu  Mon Aug 20 20:41:49 2001
>Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 19:36:54 -0600 (MDT)
>From: Barak Pearlmutter <bap@cs.unm.edu>
>To: henry@sourcelight.com
>Subject: Re: Debian packages of MLton
>Reply-to: bap@cs.unm.edu
>
>Okay, I'll put in a build dependency against libgpm2 (>= 2.0.2), and a
>similar install-time dependency will be generated automatically.
>Is it easy to run a regression test against gmp3.x ?
>
>There's a "build-depends" entry in the "debian/control" file which
>lists the tools used at build time, including for the packaging.  Not
>counting "essential" ones like GCC, which are assumed.  Basically, the
>essential debian packaging tools are in dpkg-dev, plus I use some
>debhelper packaging scripts.
>
>It's kind of a Rube Goldberg process, but very flexible - you can see
>the packaging manual in the "developers corner" on www.debian.org.
>
>From bap@sweat.cs.unm.edu  Mon Aug 20 20:51:49 2001
>Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 19:48:19 -0600 (MDT)
>From: Barak Pearlmutter <bap@cs.unm.edu>
>To: henry@sourcelight.com
>Subject: Re: Debian packages of MLton
>Reply-to: bap@cs.unm.edu
>
>That's why debian packages have installation-time dependencies, with
>precise control of versions.  Eg
> Depends: libgmp2 (>= 2.0.2) (<< 2.1)
>
>From bap@sweat.cs.unm.edu  Tue Aug 21 00:57:01 2001
>Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 23:52:17 -0600 (MDT)
>From: Barak Pearlmutter <bap@cs.unm.edu>
>To: henry@sourcelight.com
>Subject: Re: Debian packages of MLton
>Reply-to: bap@cs.unm.edu
>
>no, i do understand your point.
>lots of companies offer both shared and fully static executables, just
>to be safe.  Eg opera does this.
>
>On the other hand within one distribution, or at least within debian,
>it simply isn't an issue: you don't ship bare executables, you ship
>packages, which contain dependency information.  if someone goes
>
> apt-get install mlton
>
>and they don't have libgmp2 or whatever, apt-get will fetch & install
>it too.
>
>I hacked the makefile to just always -lgmp.  But it wouldn't be much
>harder to check for its presence, or to listen to some variable
>SYSTEM_GMP, or something like that.
>
>From bap@sweat.cs.unm.edu  Tue Aug 21 22:48:15 2001
>Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 21:46:10 -0600 (MDT)
>From: Barak Pearlmutter <bap@cs.unm.edu>
>To: henry@sourcelight.com
>Subject: Re: Debian packages of MLton
>Reply-to: bap@cs.unm.edu
>
>Okay, I've uploaded mlton to the debian master site.  It should
>trickle into the archives in the next couple weeks.  Unless there's
>some problem, it should make it into the next major release.
>
>I've also put it in http://www.cs.unm.edu/~bap/debian/mlton/ so you
>can see the diff's against the pristine sources.  (The diff's don't
>show deleted files like the gmp blob.)
>
>From bap@sweat.cs.unm.edu  Wed Aug 22 01:23:18 2001
>Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2001 00:19:35 -0600 (MDT)
>From: Barak Pearlmutter <bap@cs.unm.edu>
>To: henry@sourcelight.com
>Subject: Re: Debian packages of MLton
>Reply-to: bap@cs.unm.edu
>
>it'll be in "unstable" within a week.  another week or two and it will
>be in "frozen".  Then it just waits for the next major stable release,
>which will be ... wheneven it is.  maybe a few months, by the current
>freeze schedule.