Opam package publication (was Re: [Caml-list] [ANN] beta-release of OPAM)

["Daniel Bünzli" <daniel.buenzli@erratique.ch>]

Le vendredi, 18 janvier 2013 à 12:27, Anil Madhavapeddy a écrit :
> 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).

For now my packages where uploaded by a kind contributor (thanks to him) but in the future I intend to do so myself and I share Alain Frisch's sentiment here.

I also find the github process rather wasteful in terms of energy, moreover if a submitted package is rejected or if the pull request gets stuck for a while and I need to provide the package to someone else rapidly then I'll have to publish it a second time on another repo.

I think it would be easier to tell packagers to provide their own http repository and have a simple command in opam that allows to import a package from one repository in another.

That way I publish my packages once on a website and it ensures they are available whether ocamlpro wants them in their repo or not. I notify ocamlpro's repository maintainer (in a way to be specified by him) of the existence of the package and he can import it from my repo if he wishes. If for some reason the package never makes it in ocamlpro's repository, the end-user can just add my repo to its opam install to get it immediatly.

This solves a lot of problems very easily, without wasting too much energy, in a distributed manner and without github in the loop.

Best,

Daniel