From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Sympa-To: caml-list@inria.fr Received: from mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr (mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.82]) by walapai.inria.fr (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id pB6A8B9c024799 for ; Tue, 6 Dec 2011 11:08:11 +0100 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: An4CAPbo3U6y71UOmWdsb2JhbABEmiyPIAGBDiIBAQEBAQgLCwcUJYFyAQEEAQ8BJCsPCwUHBAUGEQMBAg4hAkMKCAYBEhICh3MCBqIaAZJtg3KHQASMcimZaw X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.71,304,1320620400"; d="scan'208";a="134125912" Received: from smtp09.bis7.eu.blackberry.com ([178.239.85.14]) by mail1-smtp-roc.national.inria.fr with ESMTP; 06 Dec 2011 11:08:05 +0100 Received: from b17.c4.bise7.blackberry ([192.168.0.117]) by srs.bis7.eu.blackberry.com (8.13.7 TEAMON/8.13.7) with ESMTP id pB6A83Hb030849; Tue, 6 Dec 2011 10:08:03 GMT Received: from 172.18.197.180 (cmp10.c4.bise7.blackberry [172.18.197.180]) by b17.c4.bise7.blackberry (8.13.7 TEAMON/8.13.7) with ESMTP id pB6A82XR021470; Tue, 6 Dec 2011 10:08:02 GMT X-rim-org-msg-ref-id: 1448047250 Message-ID: <1448047250-1323166082-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-902852055-@b26.c4.bise7.blackberry> Reply-To: Gaius@Gaius.org.UK X-Priority: Normal References: <1B0D83BD-1902-4F7C-B3FB-B759122D6AB9@googlemail.com> <877h2a9hz9.fsf@frosties.localnet> In-Reply-To: <877h2a9hz9.fsf@frosties.localnet> Sensitivity: Normal Importance: Normal To: "Goswin von Brederlow" , "Benedikt Meurer" Cc: caml-list@inria.fr From: "Gaius Hammond" Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 10:08:06 +0000 Content-Type: text/plain MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from base64 to 8bit by walapai.inria.fr id pB6A8B9c024799 X-Validation-by: gaius@gaius.org.uk Subject: Re: [Caml-list] OCaml maintenance status / community fork I for one would love to see OCaml up on GitHub. G ------------------ -----Original Message----- From: Goswin von Brederlow Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:17:46 To: Benedikt Meurer Cc: Subject: Re: [Caml-list] OCaml maintenance status / community fork Benedikt Meurer writes: > Dear caml-list, > > During the last year or two it seems that time and interest in OCaml maintenance from the official OCaml development team is diminishing. It takes several months to get a patch reviewed (if at all), which is quite frustrating for OCaml contributors and even worse for OCaml users. I suspect that this is one of the top reasons why there are only a few active contributors to OCaml (and the number of active users, at least on the mailing list, is declining). > > I understand that INRIA does not necessarily pay people for full time maintenance jobs on OCaml (and Coq), and the official dev team is probably already doing as much as possible to maintain OCaml. Given that OCaml is such a nice language with a lot of useful frameworks available, it is too sad to see it loosing ground just because of it's closed development process and lack of time of the official team. > > I'd therefore propose to open up OCaml development to a wider range of developers / contributors, to ensure that OCaml will be ready for the (functional programming) future. There are already various "OCaml forks" in the wild, with different goals and patch sets, so simply starting another fork would be rather useless. Instead I'd suggest to bundle efforts in a new "OCaml community fork", which is always based on the most recent upstream OCaml release (starting point would be 3.12.1 for now), and takes care to review and integrate pending patches as well as developing and testing new features. Let's say we'd name the fork "OCaml-ng", then we'd try to release a new patch set every month or two, based on the official OCaml release, i.e. "ocaml-3.12.1+ng201112" and so on, to get early testing and feedback (should work together closely with the Debian/Ubuntu/etc. OCaml maintainers). > > With this process, OCaml upstream could merge (tested) patches from OCaml-ng once they proved working in the wild, and thereby > > 1. maintenance overhead for INRIA people is reduced, > 2. maintenance status of OCaml would be way better, > 3. there would be a lot less frustration for possible contributors, and > 4. users benefit from a better and more up to date OCaml. > > Now that does of course raise a few questions: > > 1. What is the opinion of the official development team / INRIA on this? > 2. Who would help with the community fork? > 3. What about infrastructure? > > Feedback and suggestions are welcome. > > Benedikt +1 for getting patches better/faster reviewd and included. I'm still waiting to hear back for my Bigarray patch to support 31bit integers. MfG Goswin -- Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management and archives: https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs