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

[Fabrice Le Fessant <Fabrice.Le_fessant@inria.fr>]

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On 12/06/2011 10:42 AM, Kakadu wrote:
> Does anybody have news about OCamlPro?

Yes, OCamlPro is working on different projects to improve OCaml
(namespaces, better inlining, debugging, multicore gc, etc.), but the
main focus is currently on improving development tools (edition,
refactoring, navigation, documentation, etc.), while minimizing the
modifications on the compiler itself. The plan is to release a first
version by the beginning of 2012, but it will be complementary to OCaml,
not a replacement.

For the OCaml distribution itself, OCamlPro will have a different
release cycle for its own version, targetting industrial users, but the
high quality testing process required to do that is still under
construction.

Fabrice

> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Kakadu
> 
> On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 12:25 PM, Benedikt Meurer
> <benedikt.meurer@googlemail.com <mailto:benedikt.meurer@googlemail.com>>
> wrote:
> 
>     Dear caml-list,
> 
>     During the last year or two it seems that time and interest in OCaml
>     maintenance from the official OCaml development team is diminishing.
>     It takes several months to get a patch reviewed (if at all), which
>     is quite frustrating for OCaml contributors and even worse for OCaml
>     users. I suspect that this is one of the top reasons why there are
>     only a few active contributors to OCaml (and the number of active
>     users, at least on the mailing list, is declining).
> 
>     I understand that INRIA does not necessarily pay people for full
>     time maintenance jobs on OCaml (and Coq), and the official dev team
>     is probably already doing as much as possible to maintain OCaml.
>     Given that OCaml is such a nice language with a lot of useful
>     frameworks available, it is too sad to see it loosing ground just
>     because of it's closed development process and lack of time of the
>     official team.
> 
>     I'd therefore propose to open up OCaml development to a wider range
>     of developers / contributors, to ensure that OCaml will be ready for
>     the (functional programming) future. There are already various
>     "OCaml forks" in the wild, with different goals and patch sets, so
>     simply starting another fork would be rather useless. Instead I'd
>     suggest to bundle efforts in a new "OCaml community fork", which is
>     always based on the most recent upstream OCaml release (starting
>     point would be 3.12.1 for now), and takes care to review and
>     integrate pending patches as well as developing and testing new
>     features. Let's say we'd name the fork "OCaml-ng", then we'd try to
>     release a new patch set every month or two, based on the official
>     OCaml release, i.e. "ocaml-3.12.1+ng201112" and so on, to get early
>     testing and feedback (should work together closely with the
>     Debian/Ubuntu/etc. OCaml maintainers).
> 
>     With this process, OCaml upstream could merge (tested) patches from
>     OCaml-ng once they proved working in the wild, and thereby
> 
>     1. maintenance overhead for INRIA people is reduced,
>     2. maintenance status of OCaml would be way better,
>     3. there would be a lot less frustration for possible contributors, and
>     4. users benefit from a better and more up to date OCaml.
> 
>     Now that does of course raise a few questions:
> 
>     1. What is the opinion of the official development team / INRIA on this?
>     2. Who would help with the community fork?
>     3. What about infrastructure?
> 
>     Feedback and suggestions are welcome.
> 
>     Benedikt
> 
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> 

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