Package Hygiene in Alice

Alice is an OCaml build system and package manager I’m developing in my spare time. This post is about Alice’s packaging protocol and how it enforces hygiene while building packages.

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The -pack option has been essentially deprecated because it creates cm{o,x} that contains all the code of the library. Thus, using one module of the resulting library requires to link the full library.

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Good to know! I recently learned about hidden include directories, and I think they’ll enable a less heavy-handed implementation of package hygiene. I might switch to using hidden directories when Alice detects that the compiler is recent enough to have that feature.

You may want to have a look at this.

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Just in case “deprecated” (even with essentially before it) creates any panic in a quiet corner of the community, it’s not going anywhere at the very least until it ceases to be the least-bad option for building ocamldebug!

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