On Jan 8, 2008, at 03:08, Joerg van den Hoff wrote:

On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 03:14:21PM -0600, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

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On Jan 7, 2008, at 04:32, Joerg van den Hoff wrote:

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On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 12:05:14PM -0600, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

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On Jan 4, 2008, at 09:41, Charlse Darwin wrote:

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Mac:~ pm$ sudo port -f install mldonkey ---> Fetching ocaml

[snip]

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# How do I get it to skip ocaml?

There isn't a built-in way to do that. MacPorts is designed not to make use of any software you install outside of MacPorts. You could possibly modify the portfile to look for ocaml in a different directory. But what we would really like is for someone to figure out why the ocaml port fails to build, and fix it.

is there hope (i.e. is the package still actively maintained)?

would it be helpful to "cross post" this issue on one of the ocaml lists asking for opinions/help? if so, where to send potential answers? to "pguyot@kallisys.net" as

`port info ocaml'

tells me?

If you want to know if a package is being actively maintained, you should email the package maintainer. If "nomaintainer" is the package maintainer, then it is not being maintained.

The problems Charlse Darwin was experiencing were the result of his unique setup which included a broken sed program.

The general problems building ocaml on Tiger which were reported in ticket 13583 were resolved by me 3 days ago because the maintainer had not responded to the issue.

After you "sudo port selfupdate" do you still see any problems?

thanks.

I upgraded to 3.10.0 already some time ago (when it appeared on macports) without problems (sorry for not being specific in this respect). _should_ I have experienced problems at that time??

Nope, if you were on Tiger, it should have worked fine, initially. See, when ocaml was first updated to 3.10.0 (r25800, 2007-06-02), it worked on Tiger, but not on Leopard. Then later (r30771, 2007-11-06), a fix was committed for Leopard, but it only worked on MacPorts trunk, not the latest released version of MacPorts, 1.5.2. Then the Leopard fix was changed (r31240, 2007-11-18), but this broke the build on Tiger. Then I fixed it (r32486, 2008-01-04) so the Leopard- specific fix was applied only on Leopard, fixing the build on Tiger. But by this point MacPorts 1.6.0 had been released, so Kevin restored the original Leopard fix (r32488, 2008-01-04). You can see the history of the port's changes in the Trac repository browser: http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/log/trunk/dports/lang/ocaml

my question was a general one: ocaml is a very good piece of software so I'd like to see it supported by macports in the future.

The port has a maintainer. If a maintainer is unresponsive to an issue for 72 hours, another committer can take care of a problem, if a solution is known. If you or anyone would like to take over maintenance of a port, or would like to co-maintain a port with the current maintainer, you should contact the maintainer. If you get no response from the maintainer after repeated attempts, we can consider the maintainer gone and change it to nomaintainer, or to yourself or anyone else who wants to take it over.