From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.3 (2006-06-01) on yquem.inria.fr X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.0 required=5.0 tests=AWL autolearn=disabled version=3.1.3 X-Original-To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Delivered-To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Received: from mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr (mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.105]) by yquem.inria.fr (Postfix) with ESMTP id CB30BBC6C for ; Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:57:04 +0100 (CET) X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AlE4APbYn0fUnw7XYmdsb2JhbACCNo1nFQQGCQUbn0o X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.25,276,1199660400"; d="scan'208";a="21970279" Received: from fhw-relay07.plus.net ([212.159.14.215]) by mail4-smtp-sop.national.inria.fr with ESMTP; 30 Jan 2008 10:57:05 +0100 Received: from [80.229.56.224] (helo=beast.local) by fhw-relay07.plus.net with esmtp (Exim) id 1JK9gl-0005wC-8z for caml-list@yquem.inria.fr; Wed, 30 Jan 2008 09:57:03 +0000 From: Jon Harrop Organization: Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Re: [OSR] Ports-like package management system Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 09:51:46 +0000 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.7 References: <479F0664.2070706@exalead.com> In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200801300951.47060.jon@ffconsultancy.com> X-Plusnet-Relay: 9db0c133dfe1afff5eab5e401e0dc725 X-Spam: no; 0.00; model:01 ocaml:01 ocaml:01 dependencies:01 recompiled:01 debian's:01 distro:01 recompiled:01 git:98 frog:98 wrote:01 maintainers:01 caml-list:01 minor:01 minor:01 On Wednesday 30 January 2008 09:06:29 Sylvain Le Gall wrote: > We, in Debian, are using this way. It works pretty well... Speaking as a Debian user: the Debian model works well for all of my other software but not for OCaml. OCaml has brittle binding problems and, consequently, its Debian packages are constantly in a state of flux as all minor minor updates cause avalanches of broken dependencies and packages gradually get recompiled and redistributed. This is presumably why Ubuntu's snapshots don't work either. I'm often recompiling from Debian's source packages in a desperate attempt to get things to work. I wasted a *lot* of time doing this when OCaml 3.10 was first released on Debian because it broke so much code. That release caused a lot of problems for me and solved basically nothing. I can sympathize with the Debian user who recently said they moved to GODI. OCaml currently has lots of problems and many are quite severe. INRIA have made it clear that they will never fix these (it isn't their job). Lots of people want to fix OCaml and are more than capable of doing so. They just need an OCaml distribution they can contribute to. The solution seems quite obvious to me: fork OCaml, fix it, include a package management system specifically for OCaml in its distribution (alleviating distro package maintainers) and then users can contribute third party libraries for it easily, recompiled from source as required. If anyone does this, I for one will gladly migrate. > and don't let people going into endless discussion about Git being faster > than Darcs -- but less useful than Hg. Debian have also failed to resolve this. -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e