FAQ

*** FAQ for Batteries Included ***

*** General ***

**** What is OCaml Batteries ****

OCaml Batteries Included: a community-maintained foundation library for your OCaml projecs.


**** What is it good for ****

Batteries Included serves the following purposes:
* define a standard set of libraries which may be
  expected on every compliant installation of OCaml
* organize these libraries into a hierarchy of modules,
  with one source of documentation
* provide a consistent API for otherwise independent
  libraries.

*** Installation ***

**** Errors ****

ERROR: omake: Symbol `FamErrlist' has different size in shared object, consider re-linking

This error is caused when using Gamin rather than FAM.  Gamin is a
binary-compatible replacement for libfam that does not use the
system-wide monitor daemon.  Most packages, however, are compiled and
linked against libfam from the FAM package.  They will work with Gamin
without recompilation, but display the symbol size discrepancy
warning.  This error can safely be ignored.

If you really want to get rid of the warning, on an Ubuntu based OS,
run the following command:

	sudo apt-get install libfam0

Note that FAM misbehaves in certain environments, notably AFS-based
systems.


*** Using Batteries ***

In your source code, add [open Batteries] for the multithreaded
batteries library.  If you want to build without threads, use [open
Batteries_uni] instead.  When you've done this, you'll have access to
the batteries modules that extend stdlib modules as part of the stdlib
modules.  To access the original stdlib modules, use [Legacy.List],
for example.  Other [BatFoo] modules provided by batteries are
available as simply [Foo].

**** Compiling with Ocamlbuild ****

Copy build/myocamlbuild.ml into your source directory, and use:

    <*>: pkg_batteries, pkg_threads

in your _tags file to enable batteries for all modules.

**** Bare Findlib ****

ocamlfind ocamlc -thread -package batteries -linkpkg foo.ml -o foo

**** OMake ****

Add the following to your OMakefile:

OCAMLPACKS[] += batteries
OCAMLFLAGS += -thread