Packaging MLGMPIDL

[Alan Dunn]

Something I thought I would address to the Fedora OCaml experts:

I want to package MLGMPIDL -
http://www.inrialpes.fr/pop-art/people/bjeannet/mlxxxidl-forge/mlgmpidl/index.html
- (it's a dependency for something else I want to package, in case
anyone is interested my path is MLGMPIDL -> APRON -> Frama-C). It
links to C code in a static library and produces OCaml native code and
bytecode libraries. What is the ideal way to package this? The
packaging guidelines state that I should try not to ship a static C
library if possible, but from what I understand (which may well be
wrong, so please correct me if needed) even with the latest OCaml,
bytecode and native code just don't mix, and there's no way to load a
shared C library from native code. Thus it seems that to ship native
and bytecode versions of the library, I need to ship the static
library anyway, so I should just use this for both versions
(separating it out into a -static package too?) Furthermore, even if
there is a way to do something great with OCaml 3.11, this isn't
available for Fedora 9 and 10 (and at least 10 will be around for a
while longer)...

If someone doesn't mind, if there's a definitive guide to exactly what
can and cannot be done with respect to native, bytecode, and external
C library linking and how this varies over OCaml version it would be
much appreciated - the information on this out there is tough for me
to parse, it seems to be in bits and pieces all over the place.

- Alan