Re: [Caml-list] How can I lend developers to the Caml team?

[Xavier Leroy <xavier.leroy@inria.fr>]

> How can I "donate" some developers to the Caml team? I have asked Xavier 
> personally, but he's probably very busy and might have missed my mail.

The only mail I got from you recently (last Tuesday) was about
possible topics for a student internship, which isn't quite what
you're describing in this message.  So, maybe I missed something.

As for the "very busy" part: the Tuesday mail arrived while I was
connecting flights at Helsinki airport on my way to the "Applied
Semantics" workshop, from which I returned yesterday night, so you see
that I was hard-pressed to reply any earlier :-)

> Essentially, since Ocaml is the "the language of choice for the 
> discriminating" software company ;) we feel the need to participate 
> actively in the development of the core compiler and runtime.

We'll discuss this need in private -- the first thing is probably to
identify what itch you'd like to scratch.  Generally speaking, there
is a lot to be done in the Caml world (as many discussions on this
list point out), but mainly outside the "core compiler and runtime"
fragment.  

> I am actually asking the Caml team to accept real-world, live people, to 
> cooperate with them. We are willing to put one or two developers into 
> the core Ocaml, if the Projet Cristal is willing to "let them in", so to 
> speak.

I hope this isn't going to turn in an experiment to determine how much
"Cathedral" we INRIA folks are (answer: very much so).  Additional
manpower and external contributions are most welcome, but as I
indicated above, the demand is mostly on 3rd-party libraries and tools.

Some parts of the core OCaml distribution could use outside help
(e.g. Windows support, reorganization of the Camlp4 sources, Makefile
reengineering), provided copyright and maintenance issues can be
resolved.  But the compilers and core runtime system don't need
additional manpower, in my opinion.

- Xavier Leroy

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