From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr (mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.82]) by walapai.inria.fr (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id pB69HmRe021408 for ; Tue, 6 Dec 2011 10:17:53 +0100 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AtECADTd3U7ZSMDjjmdsb2JhbABEqlsiAQEBAQkLCQkSBSKBcgEBBAE6NAsFCwshJQ8BBCghExSHcwK1F4syBJocjGs X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.71,304,1320620400"; d="scan'208";a="134115577" Received: from fmmailgate02.web.de ([217.72.192.227]) by mail1-smtp-roc.national.inria.fr with ESMTP; 06 Dec 2011 10:17:48 +0100 Received: from moweb001.kundenserver.de (moweb001.kundenserver.de [172.19.20.114]) by fmmailgate02.web.de (Postfix) with ESMTP id A1CC91BB24EB3 for ; Tue, 6 Dec 2011 10:17:47 +0100 (CET) Received: from frosties.localnet ([95.208.118.96]) by smtp.web.de (mrweb001) with ESMTPA (Nemesis) id 0LfAbI-1R0jFT1GlU-00pbtW; Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:17:47 +0100 Received: from mrvn by frosties.localnet with local (Exim 4.77) (envelope-from ) id 1RXr9m-00049u-QW; Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:17:46 +0100 From: Goswin von Brederlow To: Benedikt Meurer Cc: caml-list@inria.fr References: <1B0D83BD-1902-4F7C-B3FB-B759122D6AB9@googlemail.com> Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:17:46 +0100 In-Reply-To: <1B0D83BD-1902-4F7C-B3FB-B759122D6AB9@googlemail.com> (Benedikt Meurer's message of "Tue, 6 Dec 2011 09:25:02 +0100") Message-ID: <877h2a9hz9.fsf@frosties.localnet> User-Agent: Gnus/5.110009 (No Gnus v0.9) XEmacs/21.4.22 (linux, no MULE) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Provags-ID: V02:K0:9o5U7/Rr624lqd+cS0kGwjbDGhn/WUoQcM0YzTHx2vH bPB5pHw09RjIewENCenSDdecE+QMpHtHpkiRQoIeJp7u4xeJK5 nY82v1zhBdyPDK/d0alGlK9TCfkfgtPRE++M3UfO94CxoD3OAX 1e4TTXeV4Ki9pC1lRC6J6cuNHUIPFq3n2hbVvtE611clUXnVY0 Ppb+/J9lpRfs2Yh+VBoug== Subject: Re: [Caml-list] OCaml maintenance status / community fork Benedikt Meurer writes: > 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 +1 for getting patches better/faster reviewd and included. I'm still waiting to hear back for my Bigarray patch to support 31bit integers. MfG Goswin