[Caml-list] OASIS, package managers and misc. poll

[Caml-list] OASIS, package managers and misc. poll

[gildor478]

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OASIS, package managers and misc.


One day, OASIS-DB will be able to automatically create package and  
repositories. We need to know what OASIS user wish to focus our effort on a  
few package manager.


Preferred package manager Choose the package manager oasis-db should support

GODI
odb.ml
OPAM
native Debian packages
native RPM packages (Fedora, Centos)
non, OASIS should provide a package manager itself


Preferred build system OASIS support by design ocamlbuild, but there are  
some other build system around. Which one do you think are worth to be  
supported by OASIS.

ocamlbuild
OCamlMakefile
OMake
ocp-build
custom scripts
native Makefile


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[Caml-list] OASIS, how to pass options to ocamldoc

[Francois Berenger]

Hello,

Is there an "oasis-way" to tell ocamldoc to run
with the following options: " -keep-code -colorize-code "
for a given project.

I guess these options are for code inlining in the output
of ocamldoc (HTML in my case).

Thanks a lot,
F.

[Caml-list] OCaml messages in French / messages d'OCaml en français

[Alexis Irlande]

Hello everybody,

I am new on the list. I have been teaching (O)Caml for 14 years, in France and South America.

I wasn't able to find a way to easily customize OCaml interpreter spoken language, the way Caml-light did,
so I decided to make a source patch, mainly designed for my classroom computers, in order to translate
OCaml interpreter messages (errors, warnings, tracing, interruptions, and so on) in French.

It now works quite well, so I was wondering if someone could be interested by that tool...


I have some questions :
- Is it the right place to talk about that?
- Am I duplicating some previous translating work? 
- Is there some license issues about spreading such a patch?
- May I post an alpha version here, as an attachment, so as to get members' feedback?

Given the subject matter, you can go on with the discussion in French, of course.

Thanks for your attention.


Alexis Irlande
 		 	   		  

Re: [Caml-list] OCaml messages in French / messages d'OCaml en français

[Gabriel Scherer]

> I have some questions :
> - Is it the right place to talk about that?

Yes, definitely. I have more reserves about encouraging people to
participate to the discussion in French: given that a notable
proportion of the people subscribed to the list don't understand
french, I'm not sure it's nice to send them unwanted french messages
or take them out of the discussion.

(There are other non-english-speaking communities using OCaml, for
example in Russia and Japan, and they apparently haven't felt the need
to communicate through the caml-list in their native language.)

> - Am I duplicating some previous translating work?

I'm not aware of any, but the Caml Light error messages used to be
localized, so there are french translations available for Caml Light.
I heard that there is some work ongoing to evaluate the feasability of
using OCaml in the French junior high school, those people may be
interested in such a translation (or have done one, but I don't know).
You should definitely share your patch in case someone is interested.

> - Is there some license issues about spreading such a patch?

OCaml's free software license requests that you make it clear what's
your code and what's the original work by distributing your changes as
a separate patch (instead of distributing the complete code of the
modifier compiler in only one step). Distributing only a patch is
fine. It is also generally accepted that pointing to a
source-versioning repository (a SVN or git repo for example) is
correct, as the commit history makes it clear what your modification
is.

> - May I post an alpha version here, as an attachment, so as to get members' feedback?

Of course, but it may be simpler and lighter to host this patch
somewhere and refer list members to it. It would also make it easier
for you in the future to point other people to this same patch.


On a strictly personal level, I'm not terribly interested in such a
feature: I have only interacted with OCaml beginners that, if maybe
not completely comfortable with English, accepted to read technical
english as part of their programming activity. If such a localization
feature was available I'm not sure I would encourage people to use it
-- if only because a single format for error message makes it easier
to ask for help and search the web about it. That doesn't mean, of
course, that I think nobody would care: I'm quite confident some
people would have a use of localized error messages.
I would be interested in more information on the profile of your
students, that made such a change an important part of the teaching
process.

On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 11:30 PM, Alexis Irlande <nexinexi@msn.com> wrote:
>
>
> Hello everybody,
>
> I am new on the list. I have been teaching (O)Caml for 14 years, in France and South America.
>
> I wasn't able to find a way to easily customize OCaml interpreter spoken language, the way Caml-light did,
> so I decided to make a source patch, mainly designed for my classroom computers, in order to translate
> OCaml interpreter messages (errors, warnings, tracing, interruptions, and so on) in French.
>
> It now works quite well, so I was wondering if someone could be interested by that tool...
>
>
> I have some questions :
> - Is it the right place to talk about that?
> - Am I duplicating some previous translating work?
> - Is there some license issues about spreading such a patch?
> - May I post an alpha version here, as an attachment, so as to get members' feedback?
>
> Given the subject matter, you can go on with the discussion in French, of course.
>
> Thanks for your attention.
>
>
> Alexis Irlande
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs

RE: [Caml-list] OCaml messages in French / messages d'OCaml en français

[Alexis Irlande]

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Dear Gabriel,


Thanks for all your comments. I will take them into account.


> the Caml Light error messages used to be
> localized, so there are french translations available for Caml Light.


Yes, I tried to reuse a lot of things from there.

Actually, I first wrote a patch for Spanish, but less complete.


> You should definitely share your patch in case someone is interested.



Thomas Gazagnaire offered me to put it in OPAM. Duly noted.





> I heard that there is some work ongoing to evaluate the feasability of
> using OCaml in the French junior high school [...]



If you have some reference, I would be interested.



> On a strictly personal level, I'm not terribly interested in such a
> feature: I have only interacted with OCaml beginners that, if maybe
> not completely comfortable with English, accepted to read technical
> english as part of their programming activity.



In a "perfect" world, made of young graduated polyglot engineers, you are totally right.


But in a world like planet Earth, where 70% of people never learnt English,

only 7% have a computer and 1% have an academic diploma,
things are a bit complicated.
There is the problem of aged people and children, too.


> I would be interested in more information on the profile of your
> students, that made such a change an important part of the teaching
> process.

I have been professor at the National University of Bogota (Colombia)
where I taught Mathematics and Computer science for 5 years.
There, the students have very diverse origins.
Some are teachers from other universities that come to learn more, 
but some are young people that come from very little villages and have
difficulties to even correctly speak Spanish.
Their parents sometimes barely knew how to read and write,
they have no idea how to behave in a classroom, how to redact an exam, etc.
But their good willing is not in cause... they just don't know.
They are doing a big cultural effort to come to study in a big city.

If you, the "gringo" (with all that it means), show that you are doing
a cultural effort too, you gain some respect.
This effort must be at least linguistic.

If you are involved in the development of what you are teaching
(if only adapting, debugging, deploying, documenting it) and not just only copying
someone else's book to the blackboard, you gain some credibility.
If you present something modern, tailor-made and experimental, you gain some interest.

All of that is indispensable if you want to sincerely convince the students
to play the game of intellectual rigour, what is really difficult, taking into account
the state of the educational system (especially public) of the country.

CAML is interesting from that point of view, because it helps to have clear
ratiocination, it automates almost all that can be automated in programming
and the error explanation is really instructive and sufficient to solve the problem.
(no "segmentation fault " but "this pattern-matching is not exhaustive.
Here is an example of a value that is not matched: 0" )
If everything goes well, the student is autonomous, and can progress alone.

But if a student really can't understand the sentences, the magic is not working. 
And all you get is a polite but definitive "Sir, it doesn't work !"

My experience shows that most of the time, in a classroom, when a student
is blocked by a CAML error, reading the error slowly and carefully
with words easy to understand by him, is sufficient to solve the problem.

And curiously, this fact is independent of the country... :-)

As a consequence, a big part of your job is... translating!
Here comes the idea of translating once and for all.


Moreover, IMHO, in a normal process, one obtains every error just once
(well, let's say... "a little number of times") and then learns how not
to do the same error again, until having problems with another error, etc.
Until, at last, just obtaining typos or very uncommon errors.

So, for the student, investing time learning the precise translation of an error,
thinking he will use that knowledge a lot in his whole life, is not the reality.
The reality is that he is learning how not to obtain it again, and he needs
to concentrate on that fact, the rest of the process being immediate and transparent.
The only one that will obtain the same basic errors, again and again, in his whole life is... the teacher.
Second reason for translating those errors once and for all.


That's why I wrote a Spanish patch for my Colombian students.
(I hope to be able to finalize it in a few weeks)
I also wrote a more complete and precise one for French, which is my language.
(That one is ready and I will share it soon)

Hope this answers your question.

> If such a localization
> feature was available I'm not sure I would encourage people to use it
> -- if only because a single format for error message makes it easier
> to ask for help and search the web about it.

You are right.
But what do you actually find on the web?
An very explicit clarification, from people like you, who speak with your words,
of a message in English, that was very explicit too (as usual in CAML).
Finally, some kind of... translation!
(Third reason?)


> I have more reserves about encouraging people to

> participate to the discussion in French [...]


That wasn't my intention ;-)

I was just trying not to exclude people who have big difficulties writing

in English, because the topic is all about that. Nothing more.

Sorry for that.



Alexis


 		 	   		  

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[Caml-list] OCaml messages in French / messages d'OCaml en français - link

[Alexis Irlande]

Here is a link to an alpha version of my patch that translates ocaml messages to French.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/59215589/ocaml-4.00.1_french_alpha.tgz

This is the first "public" release so I would greatly appreciate comments
especially about installation instructions, grammar, spelling, typography,
oversights and "official" french OCaml jargon.

I hope to be able to release the same for Spanish soon.


Alexis Irlande
 		 	   		  

Re: [Caml-list] OCaml messages in French / messages d'OCaml en français - link

[Pierre-Etienne Meunier]

Would it be even possible to make a kind of "generic" translation module, so that each new translation could be done easily by anyone, and integrated to linux distributions such as debian which provide lots of translated programs ?

Also, a cool idea is see in this feature is the ability for an external program to understand ocaml's error messages without parsing messages in english, if you can provide a translation to integers, or even to  for example.

Pierre


Em 18/11/2012, às 01:53, Alexis Irlande escreveu:

> 
> 
> Here is a link to an alpha version of my patch that translates ocaml messages to French.
> 
> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/59215589/ocaml-4.00.1_french_alpha.tgz
> 
> This is the first "public" release so I would greatly appreciate comments
> especially about installation instructions, grammar, spelling, typography,
> oversights and "official" french OCaml jargon.
> 
> I hope to be able to release the same for Spanish soon.
> 
> 
> Alexis Irlande
> 		 	   		  
> -- 
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs

Re: [Caml-list] OCaml messages in French / messages d'OCaml en français - link

[Adrien]

Hi,

On 18/11/2012, Pierre-Etienne Meunier <pierreetienne.meunier@gmail.com> wrote:
> Would it be even possible to make a kind of "generic" translation module, so
> that each new translation could be done easily by anyone, and integrated to
> linux distributions such as debian which provide lots of translated programs
> ?

With such an infrastructure it would be possible to have messages that
are not only localized but also of varying verbosity with messages for
beginners which would be more verbose. It could also make it easier
and nicer to improve the current messages.

About the technical aspect, the only sane solution I know of is
gettext (catgets() is the POSIX standard and noone uses it because
it's awful). There is an ocaml library for gettext support but unless
it is integrated into ocaml, there will be a bootstrapping issue.

By the way, Alexis, I think the license of this translation (GPLv3) is
unfortunately incompatible with the QPL that OCaml uses for the
compiler [actually this might depend on the exact interpretation of
the QPL and I think Xavier Leroy's makes it compatible]. A typical way
to license translations is "under the same license as the code" since
they're more than mere data. In any case, thanks for thinking about
it; most people skip that important part.

-- 
Adrien Nader

Re: [Caml-list] OCaml messages in French / messages d'OCaml en français

[Francois Berenger]

On 11/16/2012 06:24 PM, Gabriel Scherer wrote:
>> I have some questions :
>> - Is it the right place to talk about that?
>
> Yes, definitely. I have more reserves about encouraging people to
> participate to the discussion in French: given that a notable
> proportion of the people subscribed to the list don't understand
> french, I'm not sure it's nice to send them unwanted french messages
> or take them out of the discussion.
>
> (There are other non-english-speaking communities using OCaml, for
> example in Russia and Japan, and they apparently haven't felt the need
> to communicate through the caml-list in their native language.)

But maybe they should communicate on caml-list in English to less
fragment the community...

Re: [Caml-list] OCaml messages in French / messages d'OCaml en français

[Gabriel Scherer]

I'll let people decide where they choose to communicate.

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 2:19 AM, Francois Berenger <berenger@riken.jp> wrote:
> On 11/16/2012 06:24 PM, Gabriel Scherer wrote:
>>>
>>> I have some questions :
>>> - Is it the right place to talk about that?
>>
>>
>> Yes, definitely. I have more reserves about encouraging people to
>> participate to the discussion in French: given that a notable
>> proportion of the people subscribed to the list don't understand
>> french, I'm not sure it's nice to send them unwanted french messages
>> or take them out of the discussion.
>>
>> (There are other non-english-speaking communities using OCaml, for
>> example in Russia and Japan, and they apparently haven't felt the need
>> to communicate through the caml-list in their native language.)
>
>
> But maybe they should communicate on caml-list in English to less
> fragment the community...
>
>
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs