Re: [Caml-list] Project hosting for new OCaml projects

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

On 05-03-2014, David Allsopp <dra-news@metastack.com> wrote:
> I've got a bit of code in a library which seems worth putting online. I'm
> trying to consolidate the steps that should be taken to accomplish that
> (beyond simply putting a tarball online!) and wondering if anyone can
> confirm if what I've come up with is the "best/obvious" course of action.
> Indeed, are there already "idiot"'s guides for this - I couldn't see
> anything like it on ocaml.org et al?
>
> So, this particular library is a pure OCaml library, which simplifies things
> somewhat. At present it's built using GNU make and of course it is managed
> using findlib.
>
> It seems that the following are worth doing:
>
> * Support OASIS (and in so doing, I believe that will migrate its build
> system to ocamlbuild)

Esp. for pure OCaml libraries, OASIS will provide you with all you need
to generate in one step (e.g. .cmxs, .cmxa on the right arch and not on
the other, automatic generation of your META files with the right
dependencies and version and so on and so forth).

Although if you have a working makefile, that you install .cmxa only on
the right architecture (amd64, i386 and no mips) you should be fine and
won't have to use OASIS.

I am biased here, but OASIS helps me to lower the TCO of 24+
libraries/program with an easy workflow for quick releases (but I am an
OASIS poweruser and probably have access to advanced tools that uses
OASIS).

> * Support OPAM (which looks incredibly straightforward - being primarily a
> Windows user, the OPAM typhoon has flowed past me thus far)
> * Put the SCM online somewhere; submit a pull request for opam-repository;
> announce it
>
> So, apart from any obvious errors/omissions in those steps, I have two
> questions:
>
> 1. What are the differences, politely, in terms of things you can and can't
> do between using GitHub and the OCaml Forge for the project pages? The Forge
> seems the obvious choice, even ignoring the offensive name of the other!
> 2. Given that, is there any benefit/different to hosting the git repository
> on the Forge vs hosting it on github and simply linking to it from the
> Forge?

If you plan to have contribution and want to manage them: GitHub.

For big projects, for which I am expecting contributions, I use GitHub
and the OCaml Forge to distribute tarballs and maintain web pages of the
project.

For smaller project, I only use the OCaml Forge.

Cheers,
Sylvain Le Gall
-- 
Website:     http://sylvain.le-gall.net/
OCaml forge: http://forge.ocamlcore.org
OCaml blogs: http://planet.ocaml.org