[OSR] Caml Community Code

["Jonathan Bryant" <jtbryant@valdosta.edu>]

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List,

Despite all the great ideas on the [OSR] threads, we seem to be getting
nowhere and talking ourselves to death bickering about implementation
details of code that hasn't even been written yet.  I think the only thing
we can agree on is that tools for use by the community should be written by
the community.  Because of that, we need to start writing them: the best way
to find out what works is to try.

I've created a SourceForge project called Caml Community Code here (
http://sourceforge.net/projects/camlcode) where we can put any code for
community OCaml tools.  The fact that we can't hack the OCaml language
itself (due to French copyright law) seems to have unfortunately caused the
community to not hack together on other tools _for_ the language.  With this
project everyone can hack on the tools we'll (hopefully) end up using every
day, rather than having INRIA or one person try to build something that
satisfies everyone.  If you have code for tools (I know someone at least has
some code for a package manager), please put it in the repository so we can
all see and work on it _as as community_.

Regarding the package manager discussion, what we need is a few functioning
prototypes.  Later we can go back and cherry pick features we like and merge
them down to just two to develop a little more, and finally pick one.  I
also think we should have one CamlP4 grammar with all the community's agreed
upon "standard" syntax extensions (sort of a "new revised" syntax?), a set
of "standard" ocamlbuild plugins, and "standard" interfaces (XML parser,
etc.), all of which can be stored in the project as well.

I was waiting for the project to get approved before sending this out (it
just came through this morning), so I'll go ahead and make a temporary
directory layout.

--Jonathan

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