Re: [Caml-list] Structuring the Caml community

[Christophe TROESTLER <debian00@tiscali.be>]

Hi,

Here is my grain of salt about this issue.

On Fri, 19 Mar 2004, oliver@first.in-berlin.de (Oliver Bandel) wrote:
> 
> "The community" [...] is not orgenized enough to set up such a website.

On Thu, 18 Mar 2004, Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org> wrote:
> 
> [...] except to say that my company would be prepared to fund a
> [virtual] server and put a little time into developing this repository.

On Thu, 18 Mar 2004, Alex Baretta <alex@baretta.com> wrote:
> 
> a central repository would be cool, and my company, too, would help
> finance it or staff it.

Interested people please go ahead!  Why not have two (or more)
machines that are mirror of each other?  Also, one could reuse the
Savanah software so as to provide development support, forums,
documentation,... -- the list of available Caml packages could
automatically be computed from the projects.  Moreover dependencies
with other project could conveniently be generated from META (or
other) files and be rendered on-line as links.

On Thu, 18 Mar 2004, Markus Mottl <markus@oefai.at> wrote:
> 
> Some kind of package management in the spirit of GODI would be very
> nice indeed, and I think that this should also become part of the
> "Cathedral", because it would otherwise not take off easily.
> Package management is such a basic and important tool that really
> everybody using OCaml would need.

I agree with Markus here.  Not only coming with the standard
distribution would make it the de facto standard but, what is more
important, INRIA developers probably know more than anybody else about
the various portability issues.  Indeed I am not sure how well GODI or
findlib work on M$ Win32 for example.  Also, one needs to cooperate
with Debian (or Redhat,...) packagers -- they have some experience and
it would be good that the package system integrates well with their
efforts.  Finally, there should exist some minimal Makefile or such so
that when one library binds to C/Fortran/... code, it is "easy" to do
cross platform compilation.  Lots of us I believe only have access to
few of the platforms that OCaml supports ; tools and guidelines would
be very helpful.

My 2¢,
ChriS

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