OPAM for windows

[markulf]

I have been playing with compiling OPAM both using Cygwin and MSYS / MINGW32.

Cygwin:

make install fails because the resulting executables have a .exe suffix.

MSYS:

I run into an old but not too well documented problem with flexdll during linking:

let get_output1 ?use_bash cmd = 
    List.hd (get_output ?use_bash cmd) 

This function isn't happy when invoked on something that produces an empty list as in the following code snippet from the flexdll GitHub:

get_output1 (!gcc ^ " -print-sysroot") ^ "/mingw/lib";

Unfortunately gcc -print-sysroot in MSYS seems to do exactly that.

The error message is ** Fatal error: hd.

[markulf]

See ocaml/opam#246

[markulf]

I made some more progress in Cygwin, but opam init was acting up at least in Cygwin64.

[markulf]

The best starting point seems to be https://github.com/dra27/opam/tree/windows.

[beurdouche]

I think I did read somewhere (don’t remember where…) that this is gonna be merged in the OPAM master branch relatively soon right ?

[msprotz]

Last time I chatted with David Allsop (dra27) this wasn't quite ready to be merged. But this was a couple months ago, maybe the situation has improved.

[msprotz]

Closing this since I now distribute opam for windows along with the installer + an fstar opam package.