From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Sympa-To: caml-list@inria.fr Received: from mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr (mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.105]) by walapai.inria.fr (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id pB6HrLk9016179 for ; Tue, 6 Dec 2011 18:53:21 +0100 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: Am0CAGxV3k7B/BfSlGdsb2JhbABDqCaCWAEBAQEJCwkJFAMigXIBAQU4LwUMARALGAkWDwkDAgECAUUGDQEHAQEQh3W1PosyBJRmhUqMVw X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.71,307,1320620400"; d="scan'208";a="122282759" Received: from msa01.smtpout.orange.fr (HELO msa.smtpout.orange.fr) ([193.252.23.210]) by mail4-smtp-sop.national.inria.fr with ESMTP; 06 Dec 2011 18:53:16 +0100 Received: from [192.168.1.102] ([83.199.18.102]) by mwinf5d04 with ME id 5ttF1i0062C8GJT03ttFhG; Tue, 06 Dec 2011 18:53:15 +0100 Message-ID: <4EDE568C.9040803@lexifi.com> Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 18:53:16 +0100 From: Alain Frisch Organization: LexiFi User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686 on x86_64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20111105 Thunderbird/8.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jonathan Protzenko CC: caml-list@inria.fr References: <4EDE33A0.6070004@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <4EDE33A0.6070004@gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Validation-by: alain@frisch.fr Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Some comments on recent discussions On 12/06/2011 04:24 PM, Jonathan Protzenko wrote: > I think the main point of the discussion is to improve "the community". > If we really want to improve OCaml as a whole, then I think we can put > our efforts on better areas than patching the compiler. I completely disagree with you (and this is rare enough!). The discussion that Benedikt started is not about improving the community, it is about improving the core system. Both are important issues, but discussing them together will not help make any progress. If someone wakes up a morning with a strong desire to help OCaml and wonders how to contribute in the most efficient way, then it could make sense to compare the relative benefits of improving the compiler vs. the community vs. writing a book vs. etc. But the situation is not like that: people work on different topics according to what they enjoy or need. It happens that Benedikt has been working on issues which he (and others) considers important enough to deserve some attention. The question is now how to turn this work into something useful for OCaml, and also how to avoid creating some frustration amongst people who are willing to contribute on the core system. That said, I'd argue to avoid creating a "community" fork. It should be noted that while INRIA maintains its primary role in the development of OCaml, the "core development team" is not entirely made of people from INRIA. Historically, Jacques Garrigue has contributed a lot to OCaml without being affiliated with INRIA. More recently, several people outside INRIA have gained and used direct commit rights to the OCaml SVN repository. Experiments and proposals are typically carried on branches (which are publicly available), discussed amongst developers, and then sometimes integrated in the trunk. This works quite well, and I'm happy that Xavier continues exercising his leadership to decide ultimately what goes into OCaml and what doesn't. The problem is not so much the current process than the size of the "core development team" and the fact that many of its members can only contribute very little of their time to OCaml. I'd thus argue to enlarge this group with more people who have demonstrated their skills for working on the core system. Alain