Re: [Caml-list] Whither the Caml Consortium?

[Hendrik Tews <tews@tcs.inf.tu-dresden.de>]

Hi,

Sven writes:
   Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 17:57:07 +0200
   Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Whither the Caml Consortium?
   
   i was contemplating creating a association in france to group
   several users which would, once we are able to sum up the 2000
   euros, become one member of the consortium.

Are you sure that your application to become a member of the
consortium will be successful? As I understand it, INRIA decides
on the applications.

My impression from the current thread (and from previous ones on
the consortium) is that there is some confusion about the real
purpose of the consortium (i.e., INRIAS position) and what
members of this list think about the consortium. Some members on
the mailing list (myself included) would like to join the
consortium to influence the development of Ocaml. But for reasons
that I have not been able to grasp, INRIA seems to be not really
keen on seeing us ``small'' ocaml users in the consortium.

I would therefore suggest that we first discuss what we want to
achieve by becomming a consortium member. Then we can see how to
make our interests compatible with INRIAS constraints. If we
reach some consensus here, it is probably easier to get the
programming work done ourselfs, instead of convincing the
consortium to pay somebody to do the job.

I, for instance, would like some improvements for ocaml for which
it is absolutely impossible to get scientific reward, and which
are therefore very difficult to get implemented by the ocaml
developers. Take for instance better error diagnostics from the
ocaml parser or Thierry Bravier's ocamlyacc patch
(http://caml.inria.fr/archives/199712/msg00020.html). One way to
get these things done is to join the consortium ...

Another possibility is to write a patch (like Thierry did) and
get it into the ocaml distribution (what Thierry not achieved).
However, it is not clear (at least to me) what requirements have
to be met, to get such an improvement accepted by the ocaml
developers.

I think, what is needed is that the ocaml developers give some
guidelines on how we ``small'' ocaml users should proceed, if we
want to contribute something to the ocaml kernel. Then there
would be no need for us to join the consortium.


Bye,

Hendrik
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