I think "which control version software to use" should be strictly the choice of the developers. I've talked repeatedly with some of the major OCaml developers about that, and my impression is that, so far, they are happy to use SVN and see no major reason to change. I respect this choice and don't believe we should put any pressure on their choice of everyday tools.
I hear the argument that putting a project on github automagically increases the amount of external contributions. This might be true, but has yet to be demonstrated. The major entry-point for OCaml development discussion (besides this list) is the bugtracker:
http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/I believe it is rather clear and easy-to-use (not as powerful as bugzilla, but not as scary either). If you think more visible documentation of where to go and how to contribute is needed, I'm ready to help make that happen (for example a page on
ocaml.org). On mantis we accept bugreport, which sometimes turn into development discussion, frown upon feature requests, and welcome patches, either uploaded as a diff, or as a link to whatever-web-mirror-for-wichever-dcvs-you-like ( for example feel free to fork the de-facto-official github mirror,
https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/ , and send a link to a commit there ).
My understanding of the "if we did X (which requires some not-fascinating work), we would have more contributions" kind of suggestions is that there are often cheap to propose and of doubtful effectfulness (some have been tried in the past, with not-always-convincing results). Some things have been done which are really nice, such as the "compiler hacking sessions" organized in the Cambridge area by Jeremy Yallop and Leo White at OCamllabs, and I hope we have even more of that in the future.
> The ocaml code seems under-documented, with some files still having
French documentation.
> I have a feeling folks on this list could do a
great job adding thorough documentation to the code
> if a push was made
to do that.