Re: [Caml-list] Re: GODI is shutting down

[Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain@le-gall.net>]

Hi,

2013/7/25 Fabrice Le Fessant <Fabrice.Le_fessant@inria.fr>:
> Hi Sylvain,
>
> I am sorry you feel that way.
>
> For me, it's actually the opposite: OCamlPro tries to improve the whole
> OCaml development infrastructure, adding features and optimizations to the
> compiler, writing new generic libraries and development tools, and taking
> the burden of maintaining them on the long term, so that all of us, OCaml
> developers and companies, can focus on hacking our favorite application in
> OCaml, without having first to rewrite all the tools you usually find with
> other languages.
>
> Also, as a service-provider, we mostly only work on tools and libraries that
> are funded by our customers, because they think that these tools are
> important to their business. Our current workforce on this topic is not so
> big, we could do much more to improve the environment, but for that, we need
> to find more customers (hint :-) ) so that we can design the best solutions
> tailored to their needs.
>

Don't miss my point. I think OCamlPro is achieving a technical
challenge (although I wish OCamlPro will improve parallelism in OCaml
rather than something else). I just wish you make it with a good
leadership: making people talk together and collaborating. It will
probably just cost you a few emails to do it and it is not like you
are not aware of other people existing in the OCaml community.

Dev. behind closed door is a way to manage a company, but when it came
to OSS community it quickly makes member of the community feel weird.

OCamlPro should just improve its leadership and I'll be fine.

Regards
Sylvain

> --Fabrice
> Scientific advisor for OCamlPro
>
> On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 6:11 PM, Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain@le-gall.net>
> wrote:
>>
>> This whole discussion has drifted into various technical topics but I
>> would like to give my POV on the general topic of OCamlPro vs some
>> members of the community.
>>
>>
>> I think OPAM is a great piece of work and I wished we can have two
>> package manager, including GODI for which I have contributed a little.
>>
>> OCamlPro has the worforce to do things that most of the individuals
>> cannot do: have a team of engineers working on an OCaml topic. That's
>> great expect that when you know your software is on the list of topics.
>> When you are a team of 1 and OCamlPro has decided to work on something
>> close to what you are doing, you know that you should stop working on it
>> because you cannot compete (lack of time, lack of workforce).
>>
>> This kind of feeling makes me extremly uncomfortable about the future of
>> all the libraries I maintain. This kind of FUD is extremly
>> counter-productive for any OCaml dev.
>>
>> To give you a quick taste of that, you can read:
>> http://hal.inria.fr/docs/00/66/59/62/PDF/paper_10.pdf (fr)
>>
>> where you can see that ocp-build is supposed to replace OASIS
>> (explanation about why OASIS doesn't fit, p2 at the beginning) and that
>> it should replace findlib's META file (p12, Conclusion).
>>
>> Some people will see a good news in this document and some people will
>> feel uncomfortable (like me).
>>
>>
>> I don't think making some people feel uncomfortable is great.
>>
>> Given OCamlPro position, I would love to see them achieve great things
>> and solve long standing issue like:
>> https://github.com/lucasaiu/ocaml (a reentrant runtime which should be
>> the stepping stone for parallelism in OCaml)
>>
>> I think it would be a lot more productive than to replace every OCaml
>> tools by something starting with ocp-...
>>
>> My 0.02 cents
>> Sylvain
>
>