This package is a Debian specific build of OCaml shipping a 
cross-compiler using the mingw32 compilation tools. 

The target of the compiler is win32, i.e. the compiler 
creates native binary for Windows. By native, we mean 
that the binary are compliant with the original win32
API/ABI, and do not use a POSIX emulation such as cygwin.

This also means that the compiler may not support some
unix-specific features, in particular in the domain of 
threads management. The compiler supports, in fact, 
exactly the features supported by the native OCaml compiler
for Windows.

The package also includes a support for ocamlfind. In 
order to use it, you should set the environment variable 
OCAMLFIND_CONF to /etc/i686-w64-mingw32-ocamlfind.conf:
  
  export OCAMLFIND_CONF=/etc/i686-w64-mingw32-ocamlfind.conf

Eventually, when the build system uses the autoconf tool, 
you can build the C libraries with the following options:
  ./configure --prefix=/usr/i686-w64-mingw32 --host=i686-w64-mingw32

It is convenient to install those libs directly in /usr/i686-w64-mingw32, 
though not very clean. However, it seems that /usr/i686-w64-mingw32/local is 
not recognized by the mingw32 cross-compiler.

Additionally, if your configuration script uses pkg-config
to detect libraries, you may want to set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH
variable to /usr/i686-w64-mingw32/lib/pkgconfig:

  export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/i686-w64-mingw32/lib/pkgconfig

This package and the binary it provides are not in any way 
supported by the OCaml original maintainers. For any issue
with this package, please report a bug on the mingw32-ocaml
Debian package.

 -- Romain Beauxis <toots@rastageeks.org>  Mon, 04 Apr 2011 11:36:30 -0500
