[Swig-devel] Ocaml testsuite

[Olly Betts]

I've attempted to add the Ocaml testsuite to the travis script:

https://github.com/swig/swig/commit/b7557aeb03b0385525e774ec2ca852348fce27b8

But it doesn't seem to be running it:

https://travis-ci.org/swig/swig

(It should appear at the end in the "Allowed Failures" section).

I can't see why it is being ignored - travis is clearly using the new script
(rather than an old cached copy) as you can see the test for SWIGLANG being
ocaml being run in other builds.

Run locally, the ocaml testsuite fails pretty messily. I fixed one issue
I could see the cause of, but I know little about ocaml, and the rest of
them are beyond me. It failed in the same ways before my commits cleaning
up ocaml's configure checks (several of the probed for values were no
longer actually being used anywhere), so I didn't cause the breakage.

One mystery remaining is the probe for ocamldlgen - this tool doesn't
seem to exist in current ocaml releases - it isn't in any of the Debian
packages, and there are no hits for it on ocaml.org. The only traces I
can find of it in Google seem to boil down to coming from the SWIG code!

It appears to not actually be used - the testsuite is hardwired to:

VARIANT = _static

If that were changed to "_dynamic", then the examples would try to use
ocamldlgen, and presumably fail to build.

Cheers,
Olly

[Olly Betts]

Post by Olly Betts
One mystery remaining is the probe for ocamldlgen - this tool doesn't
seem to exist in current ocaml releases - it isn't in any of the Debian
packages, and there are no hits for it on ocaml.org. The only traces I
can find of it in Google seem to boil down to coming from the SWIG code!

Aha, there's a mention in the Ocaml docs of "Gerd Stolpmann's Dl package"
with a dead link, but poking around near there finds a tarball:

http://projects.camlcity.org/projects/dl/dl-1.0.2.tar.gz

And that seems to build a "dlgen" tool.

However, it was last updated 15 years ago, so I suspect the chances of
it still working with current ocaml releases are vanishingly small.

Do we have an active ocaml maintainer? If so, it would be useful if
they could (a) determine is the ocamldlgen machinery is actually still
useful, and (b) fix the issues with the testsuite.

Cheers,
Olly

[William S Fulton]

Post by Olly Betts

Post by Olly Betts
One mystery remaining is the probe for ocamldlgen - this tool doesn't
seem to exist in current ocaml releases - it isn't in any of the Debian
packages, and there are no hits for it on ocaml.org. The only traces I
can find of it in Google seem to boil down to coming from the SWIG code!

Aha, there's a mention in the Ocaml docs of "Gerd Stolpmann's Dl package"
http://projects.camlcity.org/projects/dl/dl-1.0.2.tar.gz
And that seems to build a "dlgen" tool.
However, it was last updated 15 years ago, so I suspect the chances of
it still working with current ocaml releases are vanishingly small.
Do we have an active ocaml maintainer? If so, it would be useful if
they could (a) determine is the ocamldlgen machinery is actually still
useful, and (b) fix the issues with the testsuite.

There hasn't been any work on ocaml for years and although the
test-suite did once work for ocaml, I really can't remember exactly
when, it must have been something like 10 years ago, so I consider
ocaml fully bit-rotted. We definitely need some ocaml expert to sort
out this module.

William