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

[Kakadu <kakadu.hafanana@gmail.com>]

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Does anybody has news about OCamlPro?



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Kakadu

On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 12:25 PM, 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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