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

["Gerd Stolpmann" <info@gerd-stolpmann.de>]

I'd say it depends very much for which kind of work the community fork is
used. If it is just for enhancing the standard library, please don't do it
- there are as many opinions as contributors. If it is for fixing bugs I'm
for it - provided there is a process to get the fixes back to the original
Ocaml version.

Regarding your work, Benedikt, I'm not sure what would be the best. It's
highly interesting work, but it's deeply changing the compiler, so
probably not something a community of volunteers could review (although
they could test it at least).

I'd see this more as an effort to organize help for the core team, and it
would be essential that the "fork" is working in both directions.

Gerd


> 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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>


-- 
Gerd Stolpmann, Darmstadt, Germany    gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de
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