Appending _piqi in module naming prevents from using ocamlbuild to handle piqi files

[williamleferrand]

Hi Anton,

May I suggest that you remove, in piqic_ocaml_base.ml, the operation that appends a _piqi to the imported modules? This renaming breaks ocamlbuild support for piqi in a very bad manner ..

thx!

william

[alavrik]

Hi William,

This is just the default behavior -- the output file name can be customized. There are two ways of doing it:

1. This is an ad-hoc method. Use -o argument for piqic ocaml command, e.g.

   piqic ocaml -o m.ml m.piqi

2. This method is recommended in general. In your m.piqi define the top-level ocaml-module property:

   .ocaml-module "M"

I've spent fair amount of time thinking about it and after using the system myself for a while I decided to make this behavior the default. Adding prefixes is very conventional across data serialization systems, but more importantly, it is very useful and practical.

Anton

[alavrik]

BTW, I don't use ocamlbuild as I prefer good old makefiles and OCamlMakefile. But I guess the way how automatic rules work in ocamlbuild should be similar.

The problem with creating automatic rules for piqic in makefiles or ocamlbuild is that they are not reliable enough. For example, name of a .piqi file can contain - which piqic ocaml will automatically convert to _ when generating the output .ml file. This will likely break the automatic rule. Also there could be similar problems with capitalized modules. I don't know how you solved it in ocamlbuild in a generic way, but for makefiles I just ended up listing all compilation targets for piqic ocaml manually and it works beautifully. For example:

PIQI_ML_SOURCES = <list of .ml files that you get from the list of .piqi files>
....
$(PIQI_ML_SOURCES): *.piqi
    for i in $^; do \
        piqic ocaml $$i; \
    done

[williamleferrand]

hi Anton,

ok, thanks for the info and the tip!