[Caml-list] Re: GODI is shutting down

[Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain@le-gall.net>]

Hello all,

This whole discussion has drifted into various technical topics but I
would like to give my POV on the general topic of OCamlPro vs some
members of the community.

I think OPAM is a great piece of work and I wished we can have two
package manager, including GODI for which I have contributed a little.

OCamlPro has the worforce to do things that most of the individuals
cannot do: have a team of engineers working on an OCaml topic. That's
great expect that when you know your software is on the list of topics.
When you are a team of 1 and OCamlPro has decided to work on something
close to what you are doing, you know that you should stop working on it
because you cannot compete (lack of time, lack of workforce).

This kind of feeling makes me extremly uncomfortable about the future of
all the libraries I maintain. This kind of FUD is extremly
counter-productive for any OCaml dev.

To give you a quick taste of that, you can read:
http://hal.inria.fr/docs/00/66/59/62/PDF/paper_10.pdf (fr)

where you can see that ocp-build is supposed to replace OASIS
(explanation about why OASIS doesn't fit, p2 at the beginning) and that
it should replace findlib's META file (p12, Conclusion).

Some people will see a good news in this document and some people will
feel uncomfortable (like me).

I don't think making some people feel uncomfortable is great.

Given OCamlPro position, I would love to see them achieve great things
and solve long standing issue like:
https://github.com/lucasaiu/ocaml (a reentrant runtime which should be
the stepping stone for parallelism in OCaml)

I think it would be a lot more productive than to replace every OCaml
tools by something starting with ocp-...

My 0.02 cents
Sylvain

On 22-07-2013, Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de> wrote:
> Dear subscriber,
>
> Unfortunately, it is no longer possible for me to run the GODI
> distribution. GODI will not upgrade to OCaml 4.01 once it is out, and it
> will shut down the public service in the course of September 2013. The
> website, camlcity.org, will remain up, but with reduced content. Existing
> GODI installations can be continued to be used, but upgrades or bugfixes
> will not be available when GODI is off.
>
> Although there are still a lot of GODI users, it is unavoidable to shut
> GODI down due to lack of supporters, especially package developers. I was
> more or less alone in the past months, and my time contingent will not
> allow it to do the upgrade to OCaml 4.01 alone (when it is released).
>
> Also, there was a lot of noise about a competing packaging system for
> OCaml in the past weeks: OPAM. Apparently, it got a lot of attention both
> from individuals and from organizations. As I see it, the OCaml community
> is too small to support two systems, and so in some sense GODI is
> displaced by OPAM.
>
> The sad part is that OPAM is only clearly better in one point, namely in
> interacting with the community (via Github). In times where social
> networks are worth billions this is probably the striking point. It
> doesn't matter that OPAM lacks core functions like deleting all files when
> a package is removed, and that it lacks many other features GODI has. So
> there is some loss of functionality for the community (partly difficult to
> replace, like GODI's support for Windows).
>
> If somebody wants to take over GODI, please do so. The source code is
> still available as well as the package directories. Maybe it is sufficient
> to move the repository to a public place and to redesign the package
> release process to give GODI a restart.
>
> There is also another point that was driving me mad in the past weeks,
> namely missing respect from the OPAM guys. Given the fact that OPAM is
> only a thin layer around ocamlfind (and guess who wrote it), and given the
> fact that GODI was pioneering in many fields, I was expecting nicer
> wordings, and less dumb campaigning ("we have 400 packages, and you only
> 170"). OPAM is only harvesting what I seeded many years ago.
>
> Let's hope these guys get now some kicks into their asses, and are forced
> to add all the functionality to OPAM the OCaml community deserves.
>
> Hoorn (NL), the 22nd July 2013,
>
-- 
Website:     http://sylvain.le-gall.net/
OCaml forge: http://forge.ocamlcore.org
OCaml blogs: http://planet.ocaml.org