Ideas
General
The only way to create a portable build system is to produce native OCaml. Any form of compiled code cannot suit this need. Native binary doesn't work on any platform, so it is not good. Bytecode depends on the OCaml version. Only OCaml code can last long enough (but it can also become obsolete).
I think that ocamake should be a library (libocamake) containing everything which is needed to build an application (configuration, build, install). The user will provide ocamake.ml files in their project and libocamake will be source code inlined with all ocamake.ml files in build.ml. This file will be the build system.
Rules
We will need a kind of rule based design. I don't think a pattern matching as in make is good. I do prefer using MIME type of file. We can use a database to of extension to MIME type. We can apply transformation on MIME type. This will help to detect loop in the rule before building (without having to fall into a loop).
