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

["Stéphane Glondu" <steph@glondu.net>]

Le 10/12/2011 15:45, Xavier Leroy a écrit :
>> For example, have a look at PR/3746, a great example. It took almost
>> 4 years(!) to update the ARM port to softfp (and EABI). At the time
>> the issue was finally fixed, most ARM application boards were
>> already shipping with VFP, so the port is lacking behind several
>> years.
> 
> It is a great example indeed, but of my dedication to supporting OCaml in
> the long run.  Yes, it took a long time, first because adapting ocamlopt to
> a soft-FP model was absolutely not obvious (the code generator really wants
> FP regs to hold FP values), second because I had to wait a long time before
> an appropriate development and testing environment was available (namely,
> Debian ARM EABI running inside QEMU), third because nobody really cared.
> Your average maintainer would have given up at that point and canceled the
> ARM port of OCaml because ARM's floating-point is a mess.  I didn't and
> spent one full week of my summer vacations recoding the ARM port instead.
> [...]

It looks more like you wouldn't accept any external help, which is quite
contradictory with your complaining on not having a lot of time to
dedicate to ocaml. There are people that are actually paid (or otherwise
rewarded) to make all of Debian and Ubuntu (including ocaml) work
optimally on ARM (smartphones, tablets, and stuff).

So I agree with Benedikt's "lacking behind several years" point, but it
shouldn't be taken as negatively as you do. I'm not saying that someone
else would have come up with a better solution than yours :-)

>> The relevant bug report PR/5404, which includes a backward
>> compatible patch, is already waiting for a sign of life for 3 weeks
>> now (maybe wait another 4 years to get the port fixed).
> 
> More bile.  What's so urgent about it?  The next release of OCaml is 3-6
> months in the future; your suggestion will be examined by then. [...]

It's still unclear to me whether this kind of patches are welcome. I've
been recently approached by an armhf porter (other than Benedikt)
interested in having an ocamlopt running there, but I told him to back
off because I don't know whether needed changes would be merged. Once
again, I don't say we would have come up with a working solution before
the next release of OCaml, but the result (if any) would have already
been tested and deployed in Debian (and/or Ubuntu) before an upstream
submission.

Of course, we could carry on our patches in a Debian-specific way (and
we already do), but lack of upstream interest is very demotivational for
further development.


Cheers,

-- 
Stéphane