Re: [Caml-list] OCaml maintenance status / community fork (again)

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

On 12/10/2011 04:58 PM, Benedikt Meurer wrote:

> Maybe we can get back to my original proposal and restart on the
> right foot this time?

All right.  I have a number of concerns about your proposal, most of
which have already been mentioned by others.  Whether you call it a
fork or not, the mere fact of having two separate code bases for
exactly the same software components raises more issues than it solves:

- It complicates the lives of OCaml users, packagers, and 3rd-party
  library developers: what version should they use?  what will be the
  basis for the packagers's distribution-specific patches?  what
  happens if a library is compatible with one version but not the
  other?  what if the community effort runs out of steam in a few years?

- It means additional efforts with some duplication.  The
  synchronization between the "community" and the "reference" code
  bases will take work.  From the core team's standpoint, that's about
  as much work as dealing with individual suggestions and
  contributions.  At the same time, the community team will spend
  non-negligible time organizing and administering itself, at least
  initially.

- It would be a PR disaster.  I struggled (and still have to struggle)
  with my INRIA management to get a little bit of support for OCaml's
  development, e.g. Xavier Clerc's part-time assignment to work on
  OCaml.  This support is fragile and can easily disappear if there's
  a perception that "the community" will take care of that anyway.
  Likewise, I don't quite see how to explain the situation to the
  members of the Caml consortium.

For these reasons, I feel that the cure is worse than the illness.
I am, however, much more sympathetic to your other proposal, namely:

> Why not accept a model similar to i.e. the NetBSD project, with a
> lot of committers (experts in their own areas) and 2-3 people to
> keep an eye on the overall direction?

Except for the "lot of committers" part, this is pretty much how the
core Caml team has been working, and there is definitely room for more
contributors.  As I mentioned earlier, there are a number of areas
where we're lacking manpower, e.g. Windows-related stuff and tools
such as the debugger or Camlp4, but many other areas of the system
would benefit from more contributors too.  Smaller contributions
are most welcome as well, such as commenting on the PRs, testing
changes, new features and release candidates, PR triaging, helping to
identify the top little things to be resolved by the next release,
etc.

That's a much more low-key approach, but one that is more likely to
succeed.  Volunteers are welcome to contact us as caml@inria.fr.

- Xavier Leroy