[Debian-med-packaging] [covid-19] Help for ocaml package needed

[Ralf Treinen]

Hello Andreas,

On Sat, May 23, 2020 at 03:09:09PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:

> in the Debian Med Covid-19 sprint we have a set of packages that can be
> used to help researching the disease.  To this set of packages belongs
> pplacer which I injected into Salsa[1].  I admit I never packaged
> software written in ocaml and my initial attempt was probably weak.  It
> ends with:

I had a look at this, but without much success. It seems that this
software is a bit out of date and needs updating to current versions
of libraries and the build tools.

I do not know much about ocamlbuild, but to me it looks as if the author was
trying to do crazy stuff, like generating ocamlbuild configuration
lines for all installed ocamlfind packages *installed on the system*
(ocamlfind is an ocaml helper tool, it has its own notion of packages).
I tried to patch the find_packages function by setting its result to
a fixed list ["batteries"; "csv"] but then ran into a typing error
when using the csv ocaml library. The software seems to depend on
an old version of that library (1.2.2, according to
opam-requirements.txt) while the current version of that library in
debian is 2.4.

Sorry. Maybe someone else on the ocaml-team can help ?

Cheers -Ralf.