Thanks to some targetted optimisations in the script which manages Relocatable OCaml’s various branches, I’d vastly improved the turn-around time when making changes to the patch-set and propagating them through the various tests and backports. On Tuesday night, the entire set of branches was green in CI (they’re sat here with green check marks and everything). All that was to be needed on Wednesday was to quickly update the opam packaging to take advantage of Relocatable-awesomeness and plumb it all together. The 2022 version of the packages for Ljubljana I knew contained a hack for searching a previous switch, but I’d already investigated a more principled approach using opam’s build-id variable, so it would just be a matter of plumbing that in and using the cloning mechanism already in that script.

And then I opened that scripts which I’d hacked together ready for the talk in 2022 in Ljubljana. I vaguely remember getting that all working at some ungodly hour of the morning. The final clone is an unsightly:

    # Cloning
    SOURCE="$(cat clone-from)"
    cp "$SOURCE/share/ocaml/config.cache" .
    mkdir -p "$1/man/man1"
    cp "$SOURCE/man/man1/"ocaml* "$1/man/man1/"
    mkdir -p "$1/bin"
    cp "$SOURCE/bin/"ocaml* "$1/bin/"
    rm -rf "$1/lib/ocaml"
    cp -a "$SOURCE/lib/ocaml" "$1/lib/"

with no attempt to check the file lists 😭 Sorting out the installation targets in OCaml’s build system is on my radar, but was not on my “Relocatable OCaml blockers” TODO list.

We were so close

Alas, the things which you can get away for a demo in a conference talk aren’t quite the same as for actually maintained software. Ho hum - on the plus side, Wednesday and Thursday’s hacking now yields a version of OCaml which can generate opam install files properly, and which can therefore be co-opted to produce the cloning script actually required. Onwards and upwards, apparently now with memes…