Re: [Caml-list] Wanted: your feedback on the hierarchy of OCaml Batteries Included

[David Teller <David.Teller@univ-orleans.fr>]

On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 12:22 +0000, Richard Jones wrote:
> > Do you believe that we should have chosen otherwise?
> 
> Easy - look at CPAN[1].  If you want to scale a project you have to
> make decisions that allow a distributed network of people to
> cooperate, without needing too much central coordination.  CPAN is a
> great example of this loose coupling because packages make their own
> decision about naming (albeit they can become "official" later - but
> they won't need to rename unless there is an actual naming conflict).

Interesting point. So far, the approach of Batteries has certainly been
different, in large part because we don't want everything to end up part
of the Batteries hierarchy (or, well, lack thereof). Of course, this is
in contradiction with our sometimes imperialistic tendencies, so we may
be guilty of schizophrenia.

Perhaps we should organise a poll on this subject.

> If the problem is documentation or provenance of packages, then add a
> mechanism to solve that problem.  Perl also solves this through an
> existing, lightweight, distributed mechanism (a standard location to
> install man-pages, and a standard man-page format and man-page
> generating mechanism -- POD).

I'm not sure the man-page format quite scales up to the kind of
hyperlinked complexity we have in Batteries for the moment. But yes, I
agree, we can certainly work something out. In fact, we could say that
we've started on this track, albeit perhaps not with such grand
ambitions.

Thanks for the idea,
 David

P.S.: I've pointedly ignored your perch on POD :) In my mind, that's a
very different topic. For the moment, we'll stick with ocamldoc.

-- 
David Teller-Rajchenbach
 Security of Distributed Systems
  http://www.univ-orleans.fr/lifo/Members/David.Teller
 Angry researcher: French Universities need reforms, but the LRU act
brings liquidations.