Re: [Caml-list] Ocaml 4.04.0+beta2

[Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>]

Between beta+1 and now, Damien and myself invested some amount of time
in checking the OPAM packages that fail to build on 4.04,
understanding the issue and fixing it (either in the packages or
upstream).

I was able to do that thanks to Fabrice Le Fessant's opam-builder
tool, which I think is a fantastic help for opam-repository quality
analysis:

  http://opam.ocamlpro.com/builder/html/report-full.html

(One non-intuitive thing about this output is that the big red "Deps"
square are actually not a very problematic things, the orange "Fail"
nodes are the things that really need to be fixed. In general
opam-builder is in need of some improvements and I'm sure any
contribution is welcome.)

Early adopters may have noticed that the previous 4.03 release was
rather painful: many third-party packages remained non-working on 4.03
for weeks or months after the release. I'm confident that this
beta-time quality-analysis work will make 4.04 a smooth release in
comparison. If you are interested in further discussion on these
upgrade pains, see the ocaml-platform thread:

  "Is it taking too long for OCaml software to become 4.03-compatible?
Would release process changes help?"
  http://lists.ocaml.org/pipermail/platform/2016-June/000671.html

Hopefully Fabrice will soon update the opam-builder servers to build
from 4.04+beta2 instead of 4.04+beta1; a large part of the remaining
4.04-only failures reported in the current output are fixed in beta2.

Many thanks to the many third-party upstreams that reacted quickly to
requests to improve compatibility by making new releases supporting
4.04. Thanks as well to Fabrice Le Fessant and Hongbo Zhang that did
the bulk of the work on those "main differences" implemented in beta2
to fix or limit breakage of the OCaml ecosystem introduced by some
4.04+dev changes, and to Damien Doligez that is investing an
impressive (and mostly invisible) amount of work into all aspects the
release process -- and has been for years.

If you are a package maintainer, you may want to check in the
opam-builder output that your package has at least a version that
builds correctly under 4.04 betas. If it is currently reported as
failing under beta1, it may build correctly on beta2.

In the long term, users should never experience a build failure when
trying to install a package. Non-building combinations should be ruled
out by the packaging constraints (on library dependencies or the
compiler version). If a release of your package fails to build for
some reason, whether or not you release a new version that does build,
please remember to update the old OPAM metadata to make the package
uninstallable instead of broken.

On Mon, Sep 5, 2016 at 11:19 AM, Damien Doligez <damien.doligez@inria.fr> wrote:
> Dear OCaml users,
>
> The release of OCaml 4.04.0 will take place in a few weeks. We have created a second beta version to help you adapt your software to the new features ahead of the release.
>
> The source code is available at this address:
>
>   https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/archive/4.04.0+beta2.tar.gz
>
> and the compiler will soon be available as the "4.04.0+beta2" OPAM switch.
>
> We want to know about all bugs. Please report them here:
>  http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/bug_report_page.php
>
> Happy hacking,
>
> -- Damien Doligez for the OCaml team.
>
>
>
>
> In addition to bug fixes, the main differences from beta1 are:
>
> - restored the following primitives (GPR#596, GPR#772)
>     %string_safe_set
>     %string_unsafe_set
>     caml_create_string
>     caml_fill_string
> - fixed the order of arguments given to the C linker
>   (GPR#761, GPR#758, GPR#464, MPR#6475, MPR#5890)
>
>
> --
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