Re: OCaml's Cathedral & Bazaar (was Re: [Caml-list] Completeness of "Unix" run-time library)

[Shawn Wagner <shawnw@speakeasy.org>]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 01:56:38AM -0700, Matt Gushee wrote:
> 
> What if there were an "OCaml Community Library Project"--a group outside
> INRIA that would take responsibility for extending and perhaps partially
> replacing the standard library--maybe a bit like the current ExtLib
> project, only more extensive (BTW, why are there two ExtLibs?? One of
> you change the name, please! Thank you.). Maybe if that project showed
> itself to be responsible, credible, reliable, etc. etc., after a while
> it could become the de facto standard library.
> 

There are two extlibs because two different people decided to release
libraries filling in gaps in the standard library, using the obvious name,
without knowing about the existance of another such effort. When the other
extlib was announced quite a while ago, I talked with its author, and that
the time neither one of us were willing to change names. Since then, the
other one (That most people have mentioned here) doesn't seem to be being
actively maintained the way mine is; as of a couple of days ago, when I
checked, there hadn't been any commits to its CVS tree in months. That makes
me, at least, even less likely to change my extlib's name than I was 6
months ago.

Even if one of us did change the name of ours, there would still be problems
if someone wanted to use both, because some modules have the same names.
I've also noticed other libraries recently where that sort of colllision
would be a problem. As the available number of libraries for ocaml grows,
it'll get worse. High on my wish-list for the core ocaml system is
namespaces or something similiar to help resolve this problem.

-- 
Shawn Wagner
shawnw@speakeasy.org

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