From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr (mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.82]) by walapai.inria.fr (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id pB6HCqa4014933 for ; Tue, 6 Dec 2011 18:12:52 +0100 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AkUCAJRM3k7U4xEKkGdsb2JhbABDmiyQMCIBAQEBCQkNBxQDIoFyAQEEAWgGCwULBQYlIUUSBhMJCAECBQKHbAIGtT+DcodABIxyExUBmWw X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.71,307,1320620400"; d="scan'208";a="134206122" Received: from moutng.kundenserver.de ([212.227.17.10]) by mail1-smtp-roc.national.inria.fr with ESMTP; 06 Dec 2011 18:12:24 +0100 Received: from office1.lan.sumadev.de (dslb-188-097-001-048.pools.arcor-ip.net [188.97.1.48]) by mrelayeu.kundenserver.de (node=mreu4) with ESMTP (Nemesis) id 0M0XKU-1QdO2L2h4w-00upMk; Tue, 06 Dec 2011 18:12:23 +0100 Received: from gps.dynxs.de (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by office1.lan.sumadev.de (Postfix) with ESMTP id 028F7C00C7; Tue, 6 Dec 2011 18:12:23 +0100 (CET) Received: from 84.233.128.147 (SquirrelMail authenticated user gerd) by gps.dynxs.de with HTTP; Tue, 6 Dec 2011 18:12:23 +0100 Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <4EDE33A0.6070004@gmail.com> References: <4EDE33A0.6070004@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 18:12:23 +0100 From: "Gerd Stolpmann" To: "Jonathan Protzenko" Cc: caml-list@inria.fr User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.21 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1 X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Importance: Normal X-Provags-ID: V02:K0:Hc7QTbPl4hFs+N4YLKpeEGwDYcuFaFZd3iaPfPUVHcC Jw62gnO5G8xdHOkdwb2t6VgpHCpsRZqV8pwHhIWk6AmYW+jqMl hJ3D77H6wsrquPCgu4L9qr8MIHuWPoag7yyJ8+d1rcg4J0Bkdk 2LyrYzA3YwRCaHq+PRnf5b9228AWo0y1+9G31V765PQrOWDGmA +Tgov0o2K9zBChAgXsj3CMD3NjbN5gxvuc1sJyVeT+4SJWDmO0 NzgF/Uhji1MfbgIyTuKY4R3HG5IJUmzJvZA6u2K5HIoZuHal+w SN04hCS3FKZ1d7+vCjuovjSF5bbWTcHqzsNU+pADcfqW/9fF43 BM3tOSbjb9Pytn+hv2M4mVqmDmCCGDCobbXoab/ei+QLwJVZSG cl4QA/pGIbwHQ== Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by walapai.inria.fr id pB6HCqa4014933 Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Some comments on recent discussions > Dear OCaml hackers, > > I'm very uneasy about the current opinions that are voiced on the > caml-list. I have good reasons to think I'm not the only one in that > situation, so please allow me to raise a few concerns about some recent > discussions. > > There's several subtopics in the "OCaml maintenance status / community > fork" that I'd like to discuss. > > = Improving the community = > > I think the main point of the discussion is to improve "the community". > If we really want to improve OCaml as a whole, then I think we can put > our efforts on better areas than patching the compiler. ACK. Of course, improving the compiler is a topic of its own. I can fully understand Benedikt's frustration. > == Package management system == > > The thing that's most needed is, imho, a package manager that works. > Oasis-db looked very promising as far as I could tell, but Sylvain > doesn't have as much time as he used to do. Instead of hacking on our > pet projects (which is, I admit, very rewarding), maybe someone could > step up and make Oasis-db happen. We don't have a single, unified answer > to "what should I install to easily hack with OCaml?". What made Python, > Perl, Haskell successful is the package management systems. How much > longer are we going to shy away from this issue? Sure, it's much more > fun to hack on the compiler. Not as useful. We discussed this often enough. I think Oasis-db is a part of that, but not the answer to everything. It is more designed to package smaller libraries. If you want a more universal answer, you end up with something like GODI. Btw, some quite popular languages can live entirely without package management. What I mean: this makes life easier, but is not crucial to adaption. Users choose languages because of other criteria. > == Leaving our own corner of the web == > > The OCaml community likes to stay in its own corner of the web, in > isolation. We live on obscure web sites: who knows about ocamlforge > outside the OCaml community? Who knows about the caml hump? We could > host our projects on Sourceforge or on GitHub. We could get recognition > in the open-source world through our projects, we could be more social, > we could boost the language stats on ohloh, we could attract more > contributors (being a fervent user of GitHub, I must say I've attracted > a significant amount of contributors that way ; being on an obscure > forge, I'm certain it would've never happened). We stay away from that. > Why? Because GitHub is not open-source. The whole point of git is that > everyone, everywhere has a backup copy and that we don't care if GitHub > falls down. Nevermind. This may all be true for a single person. A group is recognized differently, though, especially by real social interaction (conferences, meetings etc.), by press coverage, and by company support. > GitHub Can't we stop talking about such very technical things? There are ocaml projects on GitHub, and ocaml popularity hasn't boosted because of this. > = What is this about ? = > > If it's about improving the general situation with OCaml and its > community (the title of this thread contains the word "community"), then > I believe hacking on the compiler is not the most effective way to > achieve that goal. We're hackers. We like to hack on things. And we > often fail to ask ourselves: is it really worth implementing? Submitting > patches is easy. Submitting quality patches that do solve a real problem > is harder. The ARM backend does need a cleanup, and the patch does solve > a stringent issue. That may not be the case for all patches. You will for sure see troll patches - people trying to get something into the compiler that should better not be solved there. I'm not sure whether a community process can sort this all out. However, I'm not against trying it, because there is a large class of undoubted problems (e.g. errors). > There is indeed a problem w.r.t external contributions. I agree that the > INRIA team could make it clearer what its stance on external > contributions is. I'd also like to hear this. Gerd > Maybe one solution would be to have a INRIA-endorsed > ocaml-next on github that everyone can fork, where we would merge really > outstanding features, before submitting them to INRIA, as you described. > I don't think it is such a good idea creating a real fork. Maybe some > sort of integration platform on GitHub would be the right solution to > the "patch review" problem. > > I'm not even sure what kind of patches you wish to see integrated. Can > you clarify that? > > = Conclusion = > > This is indeed a long rant, but I'd like to see us being more practical > and down-to-earth. I love OCaml. I think we can do better for the > language. > > Kind regards, > > jonathan > > > -- > Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management and archives: > https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list > Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners > Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs > > -- Gerd Stolpmann, Darmstadt, Germany gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de Creator of GODI and camlcity.org. Contact details: http://www.camlcity.org/contact.html Company homepage: http://www.gerd-stolpmann.de *** Searching for new projects! Need consulting for system *** programming in Ocaml? Gerd Stolpmann can help you.