Blog of Sylvain Le Gall

I am happy to announce the release of OASIS v0.4.2.

OASIS is a tool to help OCaml developers to integrate configure, build and install systems in their projects. It should help to create standard entry points in the source code build system, allowing external tools to analyse projects easily.

This tool is freely inspired by Cabal which is the same kind of tool for Haskell.

You can find the new release here and the changelog here. More information about OASIS in general on the OASIS website.

Here is a quick summary of the important changes:

• Change BSD3 and BSD4 to BSD-3-clause and BSD-4-clause to comply with DEP5, add BSD-2-clause.

BSD3 and BSD4 are still valid but marked as deprecated.

• Enhance .cmxs supports through the generation of .mldylib files.

When one of the modules of a library has the name of the library, ocamlbuild tends to just transform this module into a .cmxs. Now, the use of a .mldylib fix that problem and the .cmxs really contains all modules of the library.

• Refactor oasis.cli to be able to create subcommand plugins.
  • Exported modules starts now with CLI.
  • Display plugins in the manual.
  • Design so that it is possible to be thread-safe.
  • Try to minimize the number of functions.
  • Make better choice of name and API.
  • A subcommand plugin 'dist' to create tarball is in preparation, as a separate project.
• Remove plugin-list subcommand, this command was limited and probably not used. A better alternative will appear in next version.
• Sub-command setup-dev is now hidden and will soon be removed.

I have published a quick intermediate version 0.4.1, a few days after the previous release. This was a bug fix related to threads. I also decided to skip the release of last month. I was in the US at this time and didn't have time to work enough on OASIS (christmas vacation and a travel to the US). This month I am back on track.

This new version doesn't feature a lot of visible changes. I mostly work on the command line interface code, in order to be able to create external plugins. A first external plugin is almost ready, but need some more polishing before release. This first plugin project is a port of the script that I have used for a long time and that was present in the source code of oasis (oasis-dist.ml). It will be a project on its own and have a different release cycle. The point of this plugin is to create .tar.gz out of an OASIS enabled project.

I also must admit that I am very happy to see contributors sending me pull-request through GitHub. It helps me a lot and I also realize that the learning curve to enter OASIS code is steep. This last point is something I will try to improve.