1st release of ocaml-autoconf

A couple of months ago, I joined an effort by Richard Jones to give a decent shape to autoconf macros for OCaml. The situation was a tad annoying before, because we had unofficial ocaml.m4 files floating around, which have diverged one from another, with unclear licensing terms, incompatible features, ecc.

So we started a project on the ocamlforge to coordinate all this, injected the best we could find around, add docs, polish features, and contacted copyright owner to uniform licensing terms (to a 3-clause BSD).

Yesterday we finally released ocaml-autoconf 1.0. Rich's blog post on the subject contains a nice how to to kick start your OCaml project using autotools up to automake.

A brief feature overview is in order:

  • single macro to detect main executables of the ocaml toolchain and whether native code compilation* is available or not
  • cross-compilation support
  • findlib detection and package checking, with support for alternative package names (e.g. "zip" vs "camlzip" on GODI vs Debian)
  • detection of OCaml module by module path

Enjoy, and give us feedback (bug reports, feature requests, ...) using our tracker.