standardml / smackage

Smackage is a prototype package manager for Standard ML libraries. Right now it does only minimal installation; it is mainly designed to provide a standard way of getting Standard ML code that understands where other Standard ML code might be found on the filesystem.

Installation

Installation takes five steps, and the first and last two steps are optional.

Step 1: Pick a SMACKAGE_HOME directory (optional).

The $SMACKAGE_HOME directory is where Smackage will put all of its files. This will be ~/.smackage by default if you don't do anything; see the section "The $SMACKAGE_HOME directory" towards the bottom if you'd like Smackage to put its files somewhere else.

Step 2: Set up your SML compilers to use Smackage.

You have to configure your SML compilers to find the code that Smackage will put on your system. This is a bit system-dependent; see the section "Setting up your SML path map" below for details.

Step 3: Download.

Finally, you can actually build Smackage with the following commands; the first git clone... command is just one of the ways you can get smackage onto your hard drive; an alternative would be to download one of the tarred or zipped releases. Note: the directory (probably named smackage) that you put the initial Smackage code into should not be the same as the $SMACKAGE_HOME directory.

$ git clone git://github.com/standardml/smackage.git # or something
$ cd smackage
$ make mlton # (or `smlnj', or `win+smlnj' if you're in Cygwin)
$ bin/smackage

Smackage now lives in the bin subdirectory of the current directory.

To install smackage in $SMACKAGE_HOME,

$ DESTDIR=$SMACKAGE_HOME make install

Now you can proceed to update your path and use smackage without having the build repository available.

Step 4: Update your PATH (optional).

Smackage-aware applications have a makefile option install that places a binary in $SMACKAGE_HOME/bin IF the makefile is invoked through smackage make. If you want to use Smackage to install applications, you should add $SMACKAGE_HOME/bin to your PATH environment variable.

(Remember: don't literally add $SMACKAGE_HOME/bin, replace $SMACKAGE_HOME with the absolute path of whatever directory you picked in Step 1. So you'll really add something like /Users/myusername/.smackage/bin to your path.)

Step 5: Bootstrap (optional).

Smackage is a smackage-aware application! If you added $SMACKAGE_HOME/bin to your search path, then you can run the following:

$ bin/smackage refresh
$ bin/smackage make smackage mlton # or smlnj, or win+smlnj, etc
$ bin/smackage make smackage install
$ which smackage

(Type bin/smackage make smackage to see all the possible installation options: polyml, win+mlton, mlkit, etc...)

The last command, which smackage, should report that Smackage can be found at $SMACKAGE_HOME/bin/smackage. Now you've bootstrapped Smackage: you no longer need the current directory where you downloaded Smackage, you just need the $SMACKAGE_HOME directory.

Referring to Smackage packages

If you've performed all the steps described above, you will be able to refer to cmlib as $SMACKAGE/cmlib/v1/cmlib.cm (in SML/NJ .cm files) or as $(SMACKAGE)/cmlib/v1/cmlib.mlb (in .mlb files).

You want to add $SMACKAGE_HOME/bin to your path if you want to use applications compiled through Smackage.

Building Smackage packages

Smackage doesn't have a uniform build process, at least not yet. Instead, we support a simple smackage make command. If you type smackage make package blah blah blah, smackage will try to run make blah blah blah in the directory where package lives. We suggest that if your tool compiles into binaries, say, you add a makefile option install that copies the created binaries to the directory $(DESTDIR)/bin, in the style described here. For instance, the following commands get and install Twelf.

$ smackage refresh
$ smackage get twelf
$ smackage make twelf smlnj # or mlton, ...
$ smackage make twelf install

If $SMACKAGE_HOME/bin is on your search path, you can then refer to the twelf-server binary like this:

$ which twelf-server
/Users/rjsimmon/.smackage/bin/twelf-server
$ twelf-server
Twelf 1.7.1+ (built 10/30/11 at 00:37:12 on concordia.wv.cc.cmu.edu)
%% OK %%

Setting up your SML path map

Smackage will live in a directory that we'll refer to as $SMACKAGE_HOME in this section. This directory is probably ~/.smackage, but see the section on $SMACKAGE_HOME below for more information. Whenever you see the string $SMACKAGE_HOME in the text below, you should replace it with the appropriate absolute file path, for instance I wouldn't actually write

SMACKAGE $SMACKAGE_HOME/lib

in a pathconfig file for Standard ML of New Jersey; instead, I'd write

SMACKAGE /Users/rjsimmon/.smackage/lib

Make sure you use an absolute path - starting with "/", or whatever your system uses to refer to the file system root.

Setting up SML/NJ (system-wide)

Find the file lib/pathconfig in the installation directory for SML/NJ, and add the following line:

SMACKAGE $SMACKAGE_HOME/lib

Setting up SML/NJ (user-only)

Create a file ~/.smlnj-pathconfig containing the following line (or add the following line to ~/.smlnj-pathconfig if it exists already):

SMACKAGE $SMACKAGE_HOME/lib

Setting up MLton (system-wide)

Find the MLBasis Path Map, stored in a file called mlb-path-map, usually somewhere like /usr/lib/mlton/mlb-path-map or /usr/local/lib/mlton/mlb-path-map, depending on your system. Add the line

SMACKAGE $SMACKAGE_HOME/lib

Setting up MLton (user-only)

MLton allows mlb path variables to be set on the mlton command line. If you don't want to edit the global mlb-path-map file, you can pass the SMACKAGE path as a command line argument to mlton. Since doing this all the time is tedious and would break build scripts, you probably want to set up a wrapper script somewhere in your path that looks like:

#!/bin/sh
$MLTON_PATH -mlb-path-var 'SMACKAGE $SMACKAGE_HOME/lib' "$@"

where $MLTON_PATH and $SMACKAGE_HOME are replaced with the appropriate paths. For example, on my system, I have a file /home/sully/bin/mlton that contains:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/mlton -mlb-path-var 'SMACKAGE /home/sully/.smackage/lib' "$@"

Setting up MLKit or SMLtoJs

MLKit and SMLtoJs support .mlb-files much like MLton. The only limitation is that MLKit and SMLtoJs do not support export filtering through the use of explicit MLB module bindings.

To allow for MLKit or SMLtoJs to find a definition for the $SMACKAGE MLB path variable, add a line to the appropriate mlb-path-map file found in ~/.mlkit/, ~/.smltojs/, /usr/local/mlkit/, or /usr/local/smltojs:

SMACKAGE $SMACKAGE_HOME/lib

Be aware that when MLKit (or SMLtoJs) is compiling a package, it will write files within MLB/ subfolders of the package's folder. This behavior may cause problems if you don't have write access to the $SMACKAGE_HOME/lib folder.

The $SMACKAGE_HOME directory

Smackage has to figure out where it lives on the file system whenever it starts up; the installation instructions referred to the directory where smackage lives as $SMACKAGE_HOME. Smackage goes through the following process to try and determine $SMACKAGE_HOME:

1. If the SMACKAGE_HOME environment variable is defined, then smackage will always use that as $SMACKAGE_HOME. If this directory does not exist, smackage will try to create it. Otherwise,
2. If /usr/local/smackage exists, smackage will use that as $SMACKAGE_HOME. Otherwise,
3. If /opt/smackage/ exists, smackage will use that as $SMACKAGE_HOME. Otherwise,
4. As a last resort, smackage will try to use ~/.smackage, where ~ is defined by the HOME environment variable. If this directory does not exist, smackage will try to create it.