Re: [Caml-list] About contributions to the Standard Library

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 03:37:27PM +0100, Daniel Bünzli wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> Ok generally agreed that the proposal doesn't feel like a good idea.
> 
> > Some industrial (or big academic) users being stuck with older  
> > versions of OCaml (but many aren't) for good or bad reasons, but the  
> > same ones are not likely to require the latest versions of third-party  
> > libraries anyway, so this should not even be an incentive for library  
> > authors to maintain such compatibility.

When people can't be bothered or aren't allowed to update the ocaml compiler
what makes you think there would be any difference with updating stdlib? I
think the time is better spend of releasing ocaml more frequently than making
more work by splitting compiler and stdlib.
 
> Well bug fixes… You can start branching for these users but it is a maintenance burden.
>   
> > Could you share the reasons for you to target 4.01 (and not, say 3.04)
> > today?
> 
> Note, if it were only me I'd only target the smallest version that has everything that I used in the implementation of the package…
> 
> However I have in the past published some libraries using 4.02 only features and I was asked if this could be backported to 4.01 (since it was only changing an open variant into a universal type, I did). In general I now choose 4.01 because:
> 
> 1) I think that supporting at least the current major OCaml release and the previous one is reasonable both for me and users of my software. (Well 4.03 is out now but adoption seems to have been slow… Also if the pace of major releases accelerates this rule of thumb may have to change).
> 
> 2) 4.01 has GADTs, fixes for them and a few convenient combinators added to pervasives. It seems a reasonable version to code in.
> 
> 3) IIUC it is what is distributed by current debian stable.
> 
> Note that I'm not sure whether 3) is relevant or not. In my opinion system package managers should be used to install applications written in OCaml. If you want to develop in OCaml you should install OPAM and the OCaml version you end up using is no longer really relevant.
> 
> Best,  
> 
> Daniel

3) is a big reason for me. Or if not stable then at least testing.
There is also Ubuntu and others with long term releases where versions
can remain lower than would be good.

But then again there is opam. If you can't update the system but need
newer ocaml it's easy enough to build it locally. Half the time you
need opam just because the distribution doesn't even have everything
you use packaged.

MfG
	Goswin