[Caml-list] OCaml Labs

[Caml-list] OCaml Labs

[Yaron Minsky]

A thing that should be of interest to many on this list.  We discussed
this already at the OCaml Users and Developers conference, but we're
now talking about it more widely: a new lab is being formed at
Cambridge University that is focused on improving the OCaml ecosystem.
 Jane Street is the primary funder, and Anil Madhavapeddy is the
technical lead.

If you're interested in reading a bit more about it, both Anil and I
have posts about it:

- https://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/109
- http://anil.recoil.org/2012/10/19/announcing-ocaml-labs.html

We hope and expect this effort to add to the energy and excitement of
the OCaml community, and to contribute materially to the software
infrastructure we all depend on.

Cheers,
y

Re: [Caml-list] OCaml Labs

[Paolo Donadeo]

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While I'm very grateful for your effort and while anxiously waiting for
your book, I notice that in your post you mention a brand new package
manager, OPAM.

Do we really need of yet another package manager? How can't OPAM scatter
the community further?

Now, if I write a small library and I want to make it available to OCaml
developers, I have to care about: making the source code Debian and Red Hat
friendly, godi friendly, oasis-db friendly and, now, OPAM. And there are
probably other systems I don't even know.

It's not a critics or a rant, but honestly I need a compass to orient
myself in the jungle of package managers for OCaml, and I'm using OCaml
since years, think about a novice...

My 2¢.


-- 
*Paolo*

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Re: [Caml-list] OCaml Labs

[Adrien]

Hi,

Since the topic of package managers has been started, I'd like to
stress a few things about yypkg which I write.

Yypkg is a dumb binary package manager which works everywhere OCaml,
bsdtar and xz work. It doesn't care about what is inside packages, it
works in any directory (not only /), and it's meant for developers
more than for admins (it doesn't try [yet] to provide safe upgrade
paths for the whole universe).

As for other features of yypkg, it's very fast with very small
packages and the core code is only 500 lines of OCaml, comments
included.

That said, for other package managers, you also need to compare what
they're aiming at. Godi is a full-fledge system, odb.ml has a way
smaller scope. I don't know enough about OPAM to comment on it.

As for the library you'd be writing, please, please, forget about
specific package managers when writing it! You only need a few things:
don't make your own build system but use a well-known one and use
pkg-config if it's C/C++ or ocamlfind if it's OCaml. Nothing more.

-- 
Addrien Nader

Re: [Caml-list] OCaml Labs

[Markus Mottl]

On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Paolo Donadeo <p.donadeo@gmail.com> wrote:
> Do we really need of yet another package manager? How can't OPAM scatter the
> community further?

Why should another package manager scatter the community?  If a new
package manager turned out to be worse than existing ones, nobody
would use it.  If it turned out to be better, why should having this
alternative be a bad thing?

I have so far been quite pleased with OPAM.  In my opinion it makes
life easier for both package users and contributors than other
existing approaches I have tried so far.  It's no surprise that it
already offers an impressive range of packages at this early stage.
My feeling is it will have a great future and has the potential to
become the standard packaging tool for managing OCaml installations.

> Now, if I write a small library and I want to make it available to OCaml
> developers, I have to care about: making the source code Debian and Red Hat
> friendly, godi friendly, oasis-db friendly and, now, OPAM. And there are
> probably other systems I don't even know.

I don't really care about specifically supporting binary
distributions, since I'm not targeting one particular platform (Linux)
anyway.  Binary packagers will contact you (the developer) if there is
any sort of awkwardness about your configure/build/install process,
which happens exceedingly rarely anyway.

The problems I had with Godi were not so much with how to distribute
my sources, but the elaborate and error-prone process required to
release Godi packages.  Being Oasis-DB friendly means, I guess, simply
using Oasis for package specification.  This specification is
generally useful, also for releasing to other package managers, and
doesn't just support Oasis-DB.

> It's not a critics or a rant, but honestly I need a compass to orient myself
> in the jungle of package managers for OCaml, and I'm using OCaml since
> years, think about a novice...

To me personally OCaml package management tools have not been
particularly satisfactory for years.  OPAM is a fresh if not to say
refreshing approach.  If OPAM had been available to me when I was a
novice, it would have made my first OCaml experience so much better.

Regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Mottl        http://www.ocaml.info        markus.mottl@gmail.com

Re: [Caml-list] OCaml Labs

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 07:31:28PM +0200, Paolo Donadeo wrote:
> While I'm very grateful for your effort and while anxiously waiting for
> your book, I notice that in your post you mention a brand new package
> manager, OPAM.
> 
> Do we really need of yet another package manager? How can't OPAM scatter
> the community further?
> 
> Now, if I write a small library and I want to make it available to OCaml
> developers, I have to care about: making the source code Debian and Red Hat
> friendly, godi friendly, oasis-db friendly and, now, OPAM. And there are
> probably other systems I don't even know.
>

This is certainly a valid criticism given the current state of affairs,
but I would encourage you to listen to Thomas' talk to OUD to get an
overview of why OPAM came about, and where it's going:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivLqeRZJTGs

OPAM has picked up lessons from all the other previous package managers,
and is, as Markus noted, a generally pleasant experience for beginners to
use.  It supports a nice workflow for developing libraries, has
first-class support for multiple repositories (either DVCS or local
archives), and simultaneous installations of multiple standard libraries.

Just this by itself probably wouldnt justify a brand new package manager,
and the longer term plan is tighter integration with OASIS, ocamlbuild and
the many other build systems available.  Ultimately, we want to make it
really easy for a beginner to jump in, write their own code, reuse other
peoples code, and publish it online.  There have been a number of (very
brave and good) pieces of this puzzle over the years (notably OASIS), but
OPAM aims to pull them all together into an integrated whole.

You'll see much more of this in the next few months as OCaml Labs spins up
and begins supporting OCamlPro more in their efforts.  The first thing
we're doing is to get the ocaml.org infrastructure in place (and moving
over the excellent ocaml-lang.org over to the new domain), and part of
that work will be to figure out the unification of OASIS-DB, OPAM and
other package managers into one site.  I'm personally aiming for a demo at
the OCaml Consortium meeting in late November, and then it'll be announced
on the list.  Much of the work on OPAM has been guided by the requirements
of the bigger industrial members of the Consortium, such as Jane Street
and Citrix (e.g. support for private repositories).

I'll send out more details about this work shortly. Meanwhile, if you're
interested in working on it full-time, please do apply for the jobs at
OCaml Labs, and get in touch with questions. It's going to be fun!

-anil

Re: [Caml-list] OCaml Labs

[Paolo Donadeo]

Again, I want to stress that my message was not intended to be a
superficial and uninformed critics to OPAM.

[16 minutes later]

I just watched Thomas's talk and I admit there are many very good
ideas, OPAM is in my TODO list now :-)


> There have been a number of (very
> brave and good) pieces of this puzzle over the years (notably OASIS), but
> OPAM aims to pull them all together into an integrated whole.

This is a very high profile goal, I hoped OASIS was that "integrated
whole" you are speaking about. My wish is to see a more connected and
collaborative OCaml community, where the limitations of a "system" are
solved by contribution, rather than writing another, possibly better,
system. That's why I was scared by OPAM when I read Yaron's post.

A question: can OPAM live in peace with odb.ml or GODI? In this moment
my environment is built with GODI (for compiler and major libraries)
and what is not present in GODI is installed with odb.ml, which
installs everything in ~/.odb, no conflict with /opt/godi/... Can I
say to OPAM to ignore a dependency, for example can I install an OPAM
package which depends on Batteries, while Batteries installed with
GODI?


-- 
Paolo

Re: [Caml-list] OCaml Labs

[Fabrice Le Fessant]

Hi,

I should stress that there has been no official announce of OPAM,
because it is still considered as unstable, but it should be
officially released soon... One of the major differences with other
package managers for OCaml for me is its ability to maintain different
trees, for different versions of the compiler, allowing to test easily
a new version or a patch.

On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 1:38 AM, Paolo Donadeo <p.donadeo@gmail.com> wrote:
> A question: can OPAM live in peace with odb.ml or GODI? In this moment
> my environment is built with GODI (for compiler and major libraries)
> and what is not present in GODI is installed with odb.ml, which
> installs everything in ~/.odb, no conflict with /opt/godi/...

OPAM installs its packages in ~/.opam/, so there will be no conflict
in the installation.

> Can I
> say to OPAM to ignore a dependency, for example can I install an OPAM
> package which depends on Batteries, while Batteries installed with
> GODI?

The purpose of OPAM is to manage the versions of installed packages,
so that if some package needs a new version of another package, it
would be able to upgrade that package. If some packages are managed
outside of OPAM, it will not be able to upgrade them, and upgrading
them with another package manager will break the consistency between
the packages. So, you probably don't want to do that.

Packaging a library for OPAM is quite simple (you just need to explain
how to build it, i.e. usually ./configure; make; make install), and
the repository is available on Github, so uploading a package is just
sending a pull-request there...

--Fabrice

Re: [Caml-list] OCaml Labs

[Ralf Treinen]

On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 07:31:28PM +0200, Paolo Donadeo wrote:

>    Now, if I write a small library and I want to make it available to OCaml
>    developers, I have to care about: making the source code Debian and Red
>    Hat friendly, godi friendly, oasis-db friendly and, now, OPAM. And there

Are these requirements really different ? All of these should go into the 
same directions, and improvements required from one of the packagers should
benefit all other packagers and users : configuration scripts and Makefiles
that work on a variety of platforms and respect environment variables,
avoiding custom copies of libraries that are published independently,
having complete and consistent licence information, providing documentation
and man pages ...  

-Ralf

Re: [Caml-list] OCaml Labs

[David Rajchenbach-Teller]

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This is very good news.

I believe that we are all looking forward all the promised OCaml Lab
goodness in 2013 :)

Cheers,
 David

On 10/20/12 3:46 AM, Yaron Minsky wrote:
> A thing that should be of interest to many on this list.  We discussed
> this already at the OCaml Users and Developers conference, but we're
> now talking about it more widely: a new lab is being formed at
> Cambridge University that is focused on improving the OCaml ecosystem.
>  Jane Street is the primary funder, and Anil Madhavapeddy is the
> technical lead.
> 
> If you're interested in reading a bit more about it, both Anil and I
> have posts about it:
> 
> - https://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/109
> - http://anil.recoil.org/2012/10/19/announcing-ocaml-labs.html
> 
> We hope and expect this effort to add to the energy and excitement of
> the OCaml community, and to contribute materially to the software
> infrastructure we all depend on.
> 
> Cheers,
> y
> 



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Re: [Caml-list] OCaml Labs

[Francois Berenger]

On 10/21/2012 08:38 AM, Paolo Donadeo wrote:
> Again, I want to stress that my message was not intended to be a
> superficial and uninformed critics to OPAM.
>
> [16 minutes later]
>
> I just watched Thomas's talk and I admit there are many very good
> ideas, OPAM is in my TODO list now :-)
>
>
>> There have been a number of (very
>> brave and good) pieces of this puzzle over the years (notably OASIS), but
>> OPAM aims to pull them all together into an integrated whole.
>
> This is a very high profile goal, I hoped OASIS was that "integrated
> whole" you are speaking about. My wish is to see a more connected and
> collaborative OCaml community, where the limitations of a "system" are
> solved by contribution, rather than writing another, possibly better,
> system. That's why I was scared by OPAM when I read Yaron's post.
>
> A question: can OPAM live in peace with odb.ml

If OPAM uses findlib, then odb.ml would be able to know what is already 
installed.

 > or GODI? In this moment
> my environment is built with GODI (for compiler and major libraries)
> and what is not present in GODI is installed with odb.ml, which
> installs everything in ~/.odb, no conflict with /opt/godi/... Can I
> say to OPAM to ignore a dependency, for example can I install an OPAM
> package which depends on Batteries, while Batteries installed with
> GODI?
>
>