Re: [Caml-list] OCaml maintenance status / community fork

[oliver <oliver@first.in-berlin.de>]

On Wed, Dec 07, 2011 at 10:39:30AM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> oliver <oliver@first.in-berlin.de> writes:
> 
> > Hello,
> >
> >
> > during the last years, more than one person mourned about
> > this or that dark sides of OCaml.
> >
> > Even some of the mourning and the proposals had mentioned good ideas and had
> > positive motivation, after a while it became clear, that the same people with
> > the one or the other good idea, failed badly in other areas. Good, that they
> > did not have had too much influence in the development of OCaml.
> >
> > Even in general I like the community/bazaar, I think in case of OCaml,
> > there is a lot of high knowledge in the core team, which was criticized
> > by others already, but in the long run, it turned out that the core team
> > had their reasons for a lot of decisions, which were criticized.
> > Ocaml of course will also have some history-related issues that might be
> > changed, but maybe also a lot of decisions inside, which relies on theoretical
> > reasoning.
> 
> That is no excuse for not reacting to bug or feature patches. If
> there is a reason not to accept a patch then that can be communicated.
> 
> There is no excuse for silence.
[...]

OK, I can agree here.
More communication might be fine.

I don't know how much the OCaml team is overwhelmed with work.
And I don't know how much time it needs to give feedback; that
also depends on the bugtracking tools.
If the used tools are too uncnvenient, maybe they could be changed.

But that also needs work.

I remember that I once had a feature wish.
As far as I remember, it was picked up, but
also done silently...

Last time when I was logged in at the OCaml bugtracker (long ago btw),
there were a lot of issues... some bug-reports, some feature wishes.
Don't remember if automatic messaging must be activated, but I
don't remember that status change was reported to me.

When I use launchpad for Ubuntu, then Messages will be delivered automatically
to the reporter of a bug.

Maybe the toolchain can be enhanced, so that no extra overhead for writing
messages is necessary.

Ciao,
   Oliver