more ideas (Re: [Caml-list] how could the community help with Oasis-DB;) towards a CPAN for OCaml?

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

Hello,


I again want to mention R.

The installation procdure for users is very easy.
What I also like there, is that the documentation
includes references to books, which explain the algorithms
or other background information.
Maybe thats too much of what is needed for OCaml.

But it's what I do like there.

Also R-packages necessarily need to be documented,
have a manpage / package description.

Not sure if this is necessary with OCaml stuff,
because *.mli files are there, and ocamlc -i could
print the interfaces of the modules, if nothing else is there
to rely on.
But maybe these kinds of minimalistic documentation-generation
could be created automatically by the installing tools.

Nicely printed html-docs for interfaces are very helpful.

And also nice would be, to have such nicely printed documentation
also available at the server, even before downloading any packages.
So, browsing a package documentation online could be done
before downloading the package.

The type system and module system would make it su much superior
to languages like Perl, Python or others.

It's always a fun to read the interface docs at the OCaml manual,
or that are provided by other OCaml-projects online, compared to
what any other language offers.

But for some very big libraries a meta_documentation,
something like a mini-tuorial, an overview on how to
easily jump into the usage of big library would make sense to.

Something like a hierarchical view of how the modules can be used,
because some modules may provide types that are used by other modules.
If it's displayed hierarchically and graphgically, it could save much time
looking at all kinds of modules, which maybe will never be needed.

Of course I also think that there should be some docs that explain in some words,
what the module and it's function do.
When exploring ocamlgraph some weeks ago, I saw a interface doc,
but it was not obvious what kind of functionality each function offers,
or how to find a function that offered, what I was looking for.

Via #ocaml I could get hints to the functions I needed, and it then worked
out of the box. But I would not have found it by myself.
So, maybe even some kind of keyword tagging to a provided function
would be fine.


Also what I like in the R community, is that there is a journal,
that offers articles on R, but also on statistics.
I know, there are a lot of blogs around OCaml, some company-driven,
some private.

But the R journal for R is really something that is an eye-catcher.
Downloadable as pdf. So if I want to have it on paper, I can have
high quality doc.

Current issue of R-journal:

  http://journal.r-project.org/current.html

There also is the R-Meta-Blogger-Site R-Bloggers:

  http://www.r-bloggers.com/

Of course R has a much much bigger community than OCaml.

But I think, just bringing in some more ideas could make sense here.

If this makes sense to OCaml / OCaml community or not,
I don't know. But at least I think the R-community is
somehow inspiring.

Just my 3.3 KiB

Ciao,
   Oliver