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

["Stéphane Glondu" <steph@glondu.net>]

On 12/08/2011 10:10 AM, Benedikt Meurer wrote:
> [...] I'm already pissed off by the fact that it will probably take ages for someone to even respond to the patch, not to mention that it will take forever to get it out to the users (well maybe Debian will include the patch for armhf, but that means the Debian developers have to do upstream work...).

As a maintainer of OCaml (among other things) in Debian, I must agree
with you that slow reaction, opacity in its development process, etc.
make OCaml a very frustrating upstream (one of the worst I have to deal
with). See for example:

  http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=4963
  http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=5131
  http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=5254
  http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=5279
  http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=5393

All very precise bugreports with rather trivial patches or suggestions.
Yet, no satisfactory reaction.

I once proposed a patch to "fix" the "-custom" behaviour that made
resulting executables not strippable, to avoid all sort of
special-casing that had to be done in Debian (and Fedora) because of
this behaviour. It has been rejected (but I applied it nonetheless to
the Debian package). See the discussion at:

  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=256900

(in particular, starting from message #42).

All this often leads me to just not trying to solve bugs in OCaml
myself, even for things that do affect Debian. See for example:

  http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=1710
  http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=1711
  http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=1836
  http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=4812
  http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=5371

Concerning your work on ARM, PR#5049 completely deterred me from working
on it myself, or submitting it to more competent people (and I do know
some thanks to Debian and Ubuntu).

I really think that OCaml could benefit from a more open development
model, and should leverage external contributors (that are not members
of the consortium) instead of plainly ignoring them. There is for
example no need for someone in the "core team" to feel responsible for
the ARM port. Have a look at:

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ocaml/+bug/810402

People who care about ARM solved the bug themselves. Having ocamlopt
working on all Debian architectures wouldn't look so unreasonable if the
"core team" were willing to integrate necessary changes as part of
official releases (which is clearly not the case).

I'm not advocating for faster development, endless addition of new
features, or a better standard library, I just wish better reactivity to
the community concerning the compiler or the language itself. The
general lack of "official" (whatever that means) participation in this
mailing-list is another example of this problem.


Cheers,

-- 
Stéphane