Using "ocamlfind" to make the OCaml compiler and toplevel find (project specific) libraries

Question

I'm trying to use ocamlfind with both the OCaml compiler and toplevel. From what I understood, I need to place the required libraries in the _tags file at the root of my project, so that the ocamlfind tool will take care of loading them - allowing me to open them in my modules like so :

open Sdl
open Sdlvideo
open Str

Currently, my _tags file looks like this :

<*>: pkg_sdl,pkg_str

I can apparently launch the ocamlfind command with the ocamlc or ocamlopt argument, provided I wan't to compile my project, but I did not see an option to launch the toplevel in the same manner. Is there any way to do this (something like "ocamlfind ocaml")?

I also don't know how to place my project specific modules in the _tags file : imagine I have a module name Land. I am currently using the #use "land.ml" directive to open the file and load the module, but it has been suggested that this is not good practice. What syntax should I use in _tags to specify it should be loaded by ocamlfind (considering land.ml is not in the ocamlfind search path) ?

Thank you, Charlie P.

Edit : According to the first answer of this post, the _tags file is not to be used with ocamlfind. The questions above still stand, there is just a new one to the list : what is the correct way to specify the libraries to ocamlfind ?

Answer 1

try this:

$ cat >> .ocamlinit
#use "topfind";;
#require "sdl";;
#require "sdlvideo";;

open Sdl
open Sdlvideo;;
open Str;;

.ocamlinit is sourced from the current directory, falling back to /home/user/.ocamlinit. you can explicitly override it via ocaml -init <filename>