OCaml Binaries

Unreleased

This repository builds OCaml binaries for every platform, hosts them, and wraps them in nice installation scripts that you can drop into your .travis.yml or appveyor.yml build matrix:

# Travis
wget -q -O - https://aantron.github.io/binaries/macports/x86_64/ocaml/4.03/install.sh | bash

# AppVeyor
ps: '(new-object net.webclient).DownloadString("https://aantron.github.io/binaries/mingw/x86_64/ocaml/4.03/install.ps1") | PowerShell -Command -'

As you can see, the URLs follow a simple pattern:

https://aantron.github.io/binaries/$SYSTEM/$ARCH/$PACKAGE/$VERSION/install.(sh|ps1)

The purpose is twofold:

• Speed up CI and not waste resources by rebuilding the OCaml compiler, OPAM, or related binaries. A typical build row is sped up by a factor of two or more.
• Encourage authors to test on diverse platforms by making it easier to do so.

Packages include OCaml, Camlp4, OPAM, and FlexDLL. For now, not everything is available for every system due to time constraints; you can browse the available scripts here.

The scripts are in use in CI for Lwt and OASIS.

Plan

1. MSVC scripts are nearly done, but I am not planning to work on this for about a month.
2. After that, it should be easy to wrap the existing PPAs for Ubuntu OCaml 4.01, 4.02, and provide installers for newer versions. Homebrew should also be easy.

Other

I hope that this repository can become a reference for how to package OCaml for the various system package managers out there (Cygwin, MacPorts, Homebrew, etc.). Then, we can better keep OCaml packages up to date everywhere. For example, Cygwin has been left behind at 4.02.3, and MacPorts has 4.02.2.

Perhaps, eventually, we can make regular distribution packages here as well, not just packages for speeding up CI builds.

Making sure OCaml builds on the platforms results in improvements to the upstream.

Acknowledgements

The MinGW scripts are wrapping opam-repository-mingw, maintained by fdopen.

The MSVC work-in-progress script is wrapping Chris00's ocaml-appveyor.