Re: [cocci] the future of bundles in coccinelle.git

[Jacob Keller <jacob.e.keller@intel.com>]

On 3/18/2025 3:19 AM, Julia Lawall wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, 18 Mar 2025, Olaf Hering wrote:
> 
>> While looking for the proper way to import pcre2, I realized that the
>> way configure.ac looks for required OCaml libraries is ... weird.
>> There is no way to force the usage of the variants in bundles/, the
>> version provided by ocamlfind is always preferred.
>>
>> I think since a while the required build environment is easy to create
>> with either 'opam install $ALL_BUNDLES', or 'zypper install $packages'.
>>

>> Hence I suggest to remove bundles/ and all code referring to it.

Why not go the other route and optionally use the bundles?


> 
> No, we don't want to do that.  The idea of bundles is to limit the
> dependencies.  We don't want users to have the be highly integrated into
> the OCaml ecosystem.  Typical Coccinelle users don't care about OCaml at
> all.
> 
> Perhaps it is just a personal preference, but when faced with some
> software that eg asks me to install 20 python libraries, I choose some
> other software.  I guess others may have the same reaction to software
> that requires installing opam etc.
> 
> julia

It can be tricky if asked to install dozens of libraries which aren't
packaged within the distro I'm using. If they do come with the distro
repositories, then I am quite less concerned.

On the other hand I get a bit concerned if I see a couple dozen bundles
which I have no way to know if they stayed up to date with any recent
regressions or vulnerabilities.

That being said, I have had numerous issues in the past when building
coccinelle from source where things failed to compile because of changes
in the versions I had installed by distro vs what was expected. I am not
certain if these were real conflicts or just artifacts of an incorrect
build setup, but I remember my experience being frustrated quite often
any time I had to rebuild from scratch.