Re: [Caml-list] [ANN] beta-release of OPAM

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@recoil.org>]

On 18 Jan 2013, at 11:19, Alain Frisch <alain@frisch.fr> wrote:
> 
> I've sent my first "pull request" for the inclusion of a new package in OPAM :-)

Yay!

> Are there plans to provide a more direct way to submit proposals for new packages?  If I understand correctly, the current scheme requires to create an account on github, fork the opam-repository, clone the fork locally, create and commit the package locally, push it to github, and then create a pull request.  Admittedly, this is not difficult once you're familiar with GIT and github, but I can imagine that it will still discourage some people from submitting their first package.  What about a simple web interface to upload a .tar.gz of the package description, for instance?  It should not be too hard to automate the treatment of uploaded package descriptions.

A certain barrier to entry in the early days isn't a bad thing. Homebrew seems to cope well enough with this workflow (with over 10,000 forks).   We should probably add a CONTRIBUTING file with clear instructions to `opam-repository`.

However, I do have ocaml-github [1] bindings now which we're using for comment reporting in Real World OCaml (so that comments reported via the website version are converted into Github issues for us to parse). It should be straightforward to support for this to OPAM. 

Thomas just added (in trunk) a git-like extension mechanism to OPAM which will be suitable for this purpose.  If you execute an unknown subcommand, say `opam foo bar`, it will look for the `opam-foo` binary and execute it with the sub arguments.

This should be sufficient to build an `opam-upload` command that has all the Github dependencies, without making the base OPAM package more complicated to build.  I'm still working on a stable release of Cohttp, which the Github bindings depend on, so it's important that OPAM remains easy to bootstrap without requiring zillions of bleeding-edge dependencies.

-anil

[1] opam install github