3. What about infrastructure?

Short answer: Ocamlforge ( http://forge.ocamlcore.org/ ) for mailing list, bug tracking and homepage, and Gitorious ( https://gitorious.org/ ) for code repository hosting.

Long answer:

In my experience, the most important things for a relatively-small-scale free software project are, in decreasing order of importance:
1. a place where to drop code that people can look at (and follow development, etc.)
2. a mailing-list
3. a bug tracker (mailing-list can do that but you risk forgetting old bugs)
4. some static web pages describing your project to the newcomer

Regarding (1), Github is all the hype today. I would personally advise against it, or at least about "just github", because:
- it is not free software (compared to free software alternatives such as gitorious : http://gitorious.org/ ), and I dislike hosting a free software project on a proprietary platform, although most people seems ok with it and that's their choice
- it does not provide a mailing-list, which is critical; in fact, mailing-lists tend to be replaced in github-centric (or gitorious-centric for the matter) projects tend by pull-request discussions that are by nature sparse, less effective, not very well archived, and more generally a bad way to discuss even code contributions

The OCaml Forge ( http://forge.ocamlcore.org/ ) provides hosting for OCaml software which fulfills all requirement above. Arguably, it is a bit heavy for code hosting and the bug tracker interface is less welcoming than others -- in particular Github bugtracker is very refined. I would consider Ocamlforge, with code hosting disabled and a central Gitorious repository as a very good choice for any OCaml free software project.

There are other non-OCaml-specific forges that provide mailing-lists and run on free software. Launchpad ( https://launchpad.net/ ) may be compelling if you are ready to use the Bazaar DCVS, and Sourceforge ( http://sourceforge.net/ ) has recently launched a renewed open source forge ( http://sourceforge.net/p/allura/wiki/Allura%20Wiki/ ) with apparently good support for the mainstream control version systems (git, hg, svn).

On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 9:25 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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