[Caml-list] GODI News: 3.12.1 released, new website

[Caml-list] GODI News: 3.12.1 released, new website

[Gerd Stolpmann]

Hi list,

the GODI project just updated the release line for Ocaml-3.12 which
bases now on version 3.12.1. We have done extensive tests, and found
only some minor incompatibilities for ocamlbuild (which is a bit pickier
now and chokes sometimes when it sees extra files it does not know
about). These could be resolved. At the same time, the 3.12 release
loses its beta status (which had it for quite a long time), and is now
the recommended Ocaml version.

GODI also gets a newly designed web site: http://godi.camlcity.org is
now much more illustrative and informative. As a special bonus, a news
feed is included with the newest package releases (right now only as
HTML, RSS will follow later). Also the list of packages has been
reworked and is now fully dynamic (instead of generated).

The new bootstrap for GODI is now available as
http://www.camlcity.org:81/download/godi-rocketboost-20110717.tar.gz
It also got a bit of developers' attention, and is now more intuitive.
(For example, the stage 2 of the bootstrap is now automatically started.
The bootstrap is now interactive by default.) If you do not want to run
another bootstrap, you can also upgrade your existing GODI installation:

* If you already have a 3.12 installation, just follow the normal
upgrade path for packages in godi_console. Ocaml 3.12.1 is a normal
package upgrade here.

* If you still use a 3.11 installation, just edit godi.conf, and replace
the line setting GODI_SECTION, and set this variable to 3.12. Then
perform a package upgrade using godi_console (as above).

There are a few remaining issues with the new version:

- Batteries: It is reported that there is an incompatibility with the
  new Hashtbl signature. It is being worked on this. Currently the
  package is broken. It is recommended that users wait until the
  problems have been resolved.
- Ocamlduce is still unavailable for 3.12.1. This also affects
  dependencies like godi-tyxml.
- After installing GODI on a newly set up system, I found problems
  for godi-mlgmp, godi-fftw, and godi-lablgtk(1), because they
  are out of sync with current C libraries, or the C libraries have
  become unavailable (like gtk1).
- There are a few applications which are still broken:
  apps-felix, apps-nurpawiki, apps-pkglab, apps-regstab. The
  package maintainers are notified.

The documentation archive docs.camlcity.org is still switching to 3.12
as default source for documentation. This means not all package docs are
available yet (but an impressive subset is already). I hope this will be
fixed until tomorrow.

A final word about GODI and OASIS. Sylvain is very interested in
providing the OASIS packages in a format that GODI understands. There is
now the plan that GODI extracts the required information from its
package db, and OASIS uses this to wrap its packages so these can be
included as package source into godi_console. We are now working on
this.

Gerd
-- 
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Gerd Stolpmann, Bad Nauheimer Str.3, 64289 Darmstadt,Germany 
gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de          http://www.gerd-stolpmann.de
Phone: +49-6151-153855                  Fax: +49-6151-997714
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