compile ocaml sources on a chrome-book

[fccm2]

It's difficult to compile ocaml sources on a chrome-book computer.
It's seems that the linux provided with a chrome-book is a kind of Debian inside a container, but we notice some small differences with a real Linux box.

While compiling ocaml sources it was quite difficult because I had to replace all the ln commands by cp commands, because ln commands produce errors, and so stop the build of the Makefile.

Also After reaching a result only the bytecode compiler does work, the ocamlopt command produces an error:

File "caml_startup", line 1:
Error: Cannot find file libasmrun.a

I probably didn't install libasmrun.a because I was unable to compile it, indeed the build script doesn't work out of the box as I explained above and I had to run the build manually. (I had to install everything manually, and I have only been able to get a bytecode compiler working).

I had the same problem with different versions of ocaml 4.14.1 or other versions.

If you want to make the test by yourself you can find cheap chrome-books for 200 euros.

[chetmurthy]

I'm surprised to learn this. I have used HP x360 14c chromebooks since the beginning of the pandemic, and I build/run OCaml from opam-on-up, all the time. I do development on Camlp5 and the pa_ppx suite of PPX rewriters, and all of that builds just fine in the Chromeos Linux container.

Maybe it's a question of the specific Chromebook? Mine is intel-based: maybe you're on an ARM-based machine?

[fccm2]

It’s a Chromebook Asus C423.

$ arch
x86_64
$ uname -a
Linux penguin 5.15.124-20273-g4bee82191fda #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Sep 20 18:10:16 PDT 2023 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
[...]
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 92
model name      : Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU N3350 @ 1.10GHz
[...]

Here is the error message:

$ make
[...]
  GEN target_camlheaderd
  GEN camlheaderi
  GEN target_camlheaderi
make[2]: Leaving directory '/mnt/chromeos/ocaml-src/ocaml-5.1.0/stdlib'
rm -f boot/ocamlrun
cp runtime/ocamlrun boot/ocamlrun
cd boot; rm -f stdlib.cma std_exit.cmo *.cmi camlheader
cd stdlib; cp stdlib.cma std_exit.cmo *.cmi camlheader ../boot
cd boot; ln -sf ../runtime/libcamlrun.a .
ln: failed to create symbolic link './libcamlrun.a': Permission denied

if I manually make a cp to replace the ln command and run the make command again, the make command continues until another ln.

[fccm2]

OK, it appears that this is a bug of the environment the command ln -sf bugs while ln without -sf parameters doesn't bug, so I will close this issue, sorry