Re: [Caml-list] GODI is shutting down

["Daniel Bünzli" <daniel.buenzli@erratique.ch>]

Le mercredi, 24 juillet 2013 à 19:23, Markus Mottl a écrit :
> I'm not going that far yet, I'll just wait and see whether Oasis will
> improve to the point where the hard stuff gets easy enough, or, who
> knows, until something even better comes along. But I really do like
> the idea of having a standardized packaging file within the package.

Agreed, but for me that file was renamed from `_oasis` to `opam`. It has everything, the metadata, the (optional) dependencies and the build instructions.  

Besides starting with opam 1.1 if you put that opam file in the root directory of your repository, pinning a stable package to its git repo will use that `opam` file instead of the `opam` file that is provided by the stable package which may have become outdated w.r.t. to HEAD -- e.g. new dependencies were added to the project, the build procedure changed etc -- see [1].

Contrary to what Adrian Nader suggested a few emails ago pinning is absolutely not a bad idea in general. I agree with him that using unreleased software is by definition a bad idea and I'm a strong advocate of semantic versioning and formal release processes. However the pin mechanism --- which can pin to a specific *commit* --- combined with the root `opam` file in your repo, allows to: ask someone to test a fix, quickly propagate a security fix, issue a release candidate, evaluate the damage an incompatible release would entail, etc. all this without having to disturb the whole stable eco-system and with minimal energy dissipation.  

Best,

Daniel

[1] https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam/issues/671#issuecomment-21053933