Re: [Caml-list] GODI is shutting down

[Fabrice Le Fessant <Fabrice.Le_fessant@inria.fr>]

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On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 3:55 AM, Francois Berenger <berenger@riken.jp>wrote:

> On 07/23/2013 06:07 PM, Adrien Nader wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
> > [...]
>
>  To be honest, I've never understood why opam was "started".
>>
>
> Contracted development, I guess.


Yes, mostly. OCamlPro have had a contract with Jane Street since its
creation, on improving the OCaml environment, to the benefits of both Jane
Street and the whole OCaml community. The creation of a new package manager
was identified very early as a strategic element, to improve the usability
of OCaml, and increase its popularity. Thus, we started working on Opam, in
a collaboration between OCamlPro and INRIA (within the DORM european
project), with deep inputs from the Mancoosi team at University Paris
7/IRILL (working at improving Debian package management), and later joined
by OCamllabs as soon as it was created.

Of course, Opam would not have been the same without GODI: in its design,
Opam directly benefited from the experience of GODI, as we tried to keep
GODI's strengths and to find better alternatives to avoid its weaknesses.
We also studied some other package managers, for OCaml (odb, yypkg, etc.)
and for other languages/systems (Cabal, CPAN, ArchLinux, etc.). Finally, we
made sure we would be able to easily port GODI's packages to Opam, as the
number of available packages from the beginning is an important criteria
for adoption of a package management tool by end users.

Clearly, both GODI and Opam are technically challenging software, but they
are not focusing on solving the same technical challenges (as explained by
Thomas), although the functionalities they provide are globally similar.

As a side story, 15 years ago, I wrote one of the first open-source video
players for Divx files on Linux, in C++ with optimized MMX/SSE assembly
routines for zooming and so on. I was particularly proud of it, as it was a
domain in which I had little experience (but great interest ;-) ). I got a
few hundred users, when mplayer was released and all my users progressively
switched to it. Mplayer had support for some more video formats (but
nothing I could not implement), and some of my assembly routines were much
more efficient. Nonetheless, since then, I have been a happy user of
mplayer, and it is now much better technically than whatever I could have
done with my own player. This is typical of the software world, older
projects are superseded by new projects, not always better on all technical
grounds, but providing a different user experience or pushed by a larger
team of developers.

--Fabrice

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