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Comment by yawaramin | Hacker News Reader

The OCaml ecosystem tried the Make route, it was complex, turns out no one likes maintaining makefiles by hand, and they like opaque make rules even less. Like it or not, dune exists for a very good reason.

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Make works fine with OCaml. There's a handful of rules you copy and paste around which is not ideal, but that's much easier to deal with than dune.

Can you link a Makefile for an OCaml project, which ensures reproducibility and locality? What I mean is checking checksums of dependencies upon when they are installed, and acting only in the project directory, not changing the surrounding system in order to run the program. Asking, because I tried and failed.

ocamldep will set up the dependencies correctly. For examples, have a look at the multiple Makefile.am files in libguestfs, guestfs-tools & virt-v2v projects. All run as non-root so they don't change anything about "the system" assuming that's what you meant. (On mobile at the moment so can't link easily.)

You mean this one: https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/Makefil... ?

I don't see how ocamldep is used in there. It seems to use multiple different programming languages somehow. I don't find it easy to understand what it does. It seems to be building a website as well.

I'd rather not have to maintain lists of source files to compile by hand; dune eliminates this drudge work.

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