A tool to facilitate the installation of OCaml annotation files (.cmt, .cmti, .spot, .spit).

Many existing OCaml libraries, applications and the compiler itself do not produce or install the annotation files (.annot, .cmt, .cmti, .spot, .spit) which are essential for sub-expression type queries (caml-types.el), definition seaches and code refactoring (TypeRex and OCamlSpotter). If you want to use development tools, you have to:

• Rebuild all the software from the source, adding -annot/-bin-annot option to compiler flags in build scripts i.e. Makefile/OCamlBuild/OMakefile.

• Install those annotation files together with the library objects and signatures. (Require modification of the build scripts)

for all the programs.

SpotInstall provides a post-installation workaround, consists of two things:

• A very small compiler patch which activates -annot and -bin-annot if OCAML_ANNOT environment variable is defined. (You no longder need to add -annot/-bin-annot to the build scripts.)
• A small tool to install annotation files to the library destination directory. (You no longer need to add annotation file installation to the build scripts.)

For the first workaround, you need a small patch available from::

hg clone -b annot https://bitbucket.org/camlspotter/mutated_ocaml

or included in this source package, ocaml-annot-<version>.patch.

For the second one, you can use SpotInstall. This tool.