Re: [Caml-list] [OSR] Caml Community Code

[tab@snarc.org (Vincent Hanquez)]

On Fri, Feb 01, 2008 at 02:00:19PM -0500, Jonathan Bryant wrote:
>  I think that backwards-incompatibility, despite what INRIA may say, is not
> terribly important.  Let us not forget that they set a precedent when they
> released a incompatible and scantily documented, yet significantly improved,
> CamlP4 unannounced in 3.10.
> 
> I think that if the community wrote a new, significantly improved but
> incompatible standard library and handed it to INRIA, INRIA would be hard
> pressed to find a reason not to release an backwards-incompatible Caml 4.0,
> given there was a configure switch when building the compiler to build it
> using a frozen 3.x library, which was not possible 3.9 -> 3.10.  After all,
> incompatibilities are what major version numbers are for.
> 
> >From then on, the OCaml team could ship a language only tarball (plus
> compatability library) and concentrate on exactly what they are good at:
> writing a great implementation of OCaml, without us bugging them about
> improving the library.  All of the package managers being discussed could
> pull the language from INRIA and the "new" stdlib from wherever it is housed
> and automagically put the two together.

I just want to say that I really agree with this vision as well.
That's the only way this ocaml community thing is going to work IMHO.

-- 
Vincent Hanquez