Re: opam-repo-dev now less useful

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11 Feb 2013, at 10:01, Richard Mortier <Richard.Mortier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
wrote:

> 
> On 11 Feb 2013, at 09:57, Thomas Gazagnaire wrote:
> 
>>> would the dev version mean something like HEAD? or would dev also be a 
>>> specific version?
>> 
>> yup, dev=HEAD
> 
> hm- so i'd get auto-updates on the package.
> 
> not sure how useful that would be - surely if i want the dev version, i'm 
> doing some dev on it, which means i've got the source somewhere. better to 
> have an easy way to have opam manage installation of locally constructed 
> packages? (which i think is what pin is isn't it?)

Indeed, I don't quite understand the use-case of dev vs pin here.

A simpler solution might be just to have a 'head' field in the url file, which 
contains the URL for the latest revision (e.g. 
git://github.com/mirage/mirage-platform).  Then `opam pin mirage` could default 
to the dev revision if no other path is specified.

Doesn't seem like the most important feature though. As Mort notes, most people 
will want to clone the source locally to modify it.

Actually, a commonly requested feature is 'opam source' to retrieve the package 
archive.  So this feature could work well with that.

$ opam source mirage.0.7.2
or
$ opam source mirage --head
<clones into mirage.HEAD>
followed by
$ opam pin mirage mirage.HEAD

-anil