Re: [Caml-list] binary compatibility of 3.08.3

[Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr>]

Sven Luther writes:

> Notice that this is really not nice for a bugfix release, since this means we
> have to rebuild all of the ocaml related packages on all arches, which may
> take us month and such.

I find this figure surprinsing.  Compiling the whole of GODI (which
contains roughly the same number of packages as Debian OCaml) doesn't
take months, more like one hour.  I know Debian has many architectures
and many of them are underpowered, but maybe that simply suggests that
Debian's dedication to supporting dead architectures is questionable.

> Maybe we would be better off just backporting the
> non-breaking fixes ?

Identifying those fixes would take you and the other Debian
maintainers an awful lot of time, and in the end you'd get something
that doesn't match any "official" release from us, which is something
that I'd rather avoid (it messes up bug reporting, for one thing).

> Maybe in future this situation could be somewhat improved ? 

On the Debian side, perhaps :-)  On the Caml side, I don't feel like
going out of my way to increase binary compatibility, which has never
been one of our design goals.

Cheers,

- Xavier Leroy