Comments to “Installing OCaml Batteries”

By: Matías Giovannini

Matías Giovannini — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 14:03:14 +0000

Paolo, good tutorial. For the record, this won't work for a MINGW-based port of OCaml, only for the Cygwin-based port. In particular, all paths must be specified in DOS format since under MINGW OCaml doesn't use cygpath. For Camomile, use:

./configure --datadir="c:/cygwin/usr/local/share"

(adjust to your environment; make sure it is a full path). It pays to check in the top level that Findlib correctly loads everything:

#require "camomile" ;;

should not fail with "Not_found"! I also had to correct Findlib's META file for Camlp4. Strangely enough, it doesn't specify Camlp4's library directory. Line 5 in sitelib/camlp4/META must read:

directory = "^camlp4"

Why does it work from the toplevel but not when invoking ocamlfind, I don't know. Also, building docs fails because of an incorrectly read symlink to somewhere that I couldn't determine exactly it should be.

In any case, I've got batteries, thanks to these instructions. Good work!

By: Matías Giovannini

Matías Giovannini — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 14:26:44 +0000

Ah, yes, about building docs for MINGW-OCaml: Replace the symlink "batteries.odocl" with a copy of "src/batteries.mllib":

mv batteries.odocl batteries.odocl.NO && cp src/batteries.mllib ./batteries.odocl

Then, edit Makefile so that line 10 reads:

DOCROOT ?= c:/cygwin/usr/share/doc/ocaml-batteries

Voilà!

By: Paolo Donadeo

Paolo Donadeo — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 15:18:50 +0000

Matías, I'm aware of the difficulties of building and running Batteries in a Windows native environment. My initial intent was to describe how to install everything using MSVC, which is in my opinion the natural way, but I was compelled to fall back on Cygwin, which I don't really like.

The problem here is not Batteries, but OCaml itself. I don't see much interest in supporting the Microsoft architecture and it's a PITA because, whether one likes it or not, it's the mainstream operating system and cannot be ignored. All the more so because Microsoft is member of the OCaml Consortium…

Confront this situation with Python: installing Python is a matter of seconds under Windows, you go on the Python site, download the installer, "click, click, click" et voilà you can start experimenting.

Python is a very widespread language, but even PLT Scheme (now Racket) has such an installer, and a very nice graphic REPL.

By: Johannes Engels

Johannes Engels — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 19:47:14 +0000

Thank you very much for this blog! After much straying around in the internet your article finally helped me to run batteries.

By: bob

bob — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 21:13:41 +0000

make one about how to install ocsigen from scratch please