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ABOUT-FINDLIB - Package manager for O'Caml
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==============================================================================
Abstract
==============================================================================

The findlib library provides a scheme to manage reusable software components 
(packages), and includes tools that support this scheme. Packages are 
collections of OCaml modules for which metainformation can be stored. The 
packages are kept in the filesystem hierarchy, but with strict directory 
structure. The library contains functions to look the directory up that stores 
a package, to query metainformation about a package, and to retrieve dependency 
information about multiple packages. There is also a tool that allows the user 
to enter queries on the command-line. In order to simplify compilation and 
linkage, there are new frontends of the various OCaml compilers that can 
directly deal with packages. 

Together with the packages metainformation is stored. This includes a version 
string, the archives the package consists of, and additional linker options. 
Packages can also be dependent on other packages. There is a query which finds 
out all predecessors of a list of packages and sorts them topologically. The 
new compiler frontends do this implicitly. 

Metainformation can be conditional, i.e. depend on a set of predicates. This is 
mainly used to be able to react on certain properties of the environment, such 
as if the bytecode or the native compiler is invoked, if the application is 
multi-threaded, and a few more. If the new compiler frontends are used, most 
predicates are found out automatically. 

There is special support for scripts. A new directive, "#require", loads 
packages into scripts. Of course, this works only with newly created toploops 
which include the findlib library. 

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Where to get findlib
==============================================================================

The manual of findlib is available online [1]. You can download findlib here 
[2]. 


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[1]   see /projects/findlib.html

[2]   see http://download.camlcity.org/download/findlib-1.2.8.tar.gz



