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

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

Mehdi Dogguy <mehdi@dogguy.org> writes:

> On 12/12/2011 11:59 AM, Benedikt Meurer wrote:
>> 
>> On Dec 12, 2011, at 11:21 , Xavier Leroy wrote:
>> 
>>> - 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?
>> 
>> If we can adopt the eglibc model, then the community thing will be 
>> the version shipped by distributions, i.e. the community thing is the
>> OCaml for distributions/packagers, not an alternative to the official
>> version. That way we do no longer need to maintain specific patches /
>> versions for Debian, Red Hat, MacPorts, etc. This ensures that
>> versions are compatible across different distributions (because they
>> do no longer need to maintain their own set of patches).
>> 
>
> No, distributions won't start shipping the community distribution just
> because it exists. I cannot speak for Fedora (and others), but
> Debian/Ubuntu won't switch to the community distribution that easily. In
> fact, it may appear as a seperate source package at some point but won't
> replace INRIA's ocaml in Debian.

That is probably what they said about eglibc too in the beginning. Now
eglibc is used in Debian/Ubuntu and is (or because it is) a great
success.

Obviously nobody is going to say: Yes, lets start this project, we will
ship it right away. It first has to proof itself. And first adopters
will be those that have the most problems with the standard ocaml.

MfG
        Goswin