On a side note, it's important to realise that there is no incentive for
INRIA to give up on the centralisation of the OCaml project.
The current status of OCaml is more than stable enough to serve its goals,
which are to teach computer science to french undergrads and provide a
playground for computer languages researchers.
Any attempt to expect something different from a public organisation is
unrealistic in my view.
It would be as wrong to think that the original OCaml contributers do what
they want with this project, public politics can also play a significant
role here.

A fork could possibly get traction from the community, but you would have
to provide interesting features that the real OCaml does not provide. Bug
fixes won't be enough.


On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 8:25 AM, Benedikt Meurer <
benedikt.meurer@googlemail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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