[ocaml-infra] new Github projects under the "ocaml" organization

[Xavier Leroy]

Dear Anil,

Thanks for your quick and informative reply.

On 12/07/2016 03:43 PM, Anil Madhavapeddy wrote:
> On 7 Dec 2016, at 14:15, Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy at inria.fr> wrote:

>> So, what is the policy?  how to request a new /ocaml/xxx project?
>> who takes the decision?
> 
> Technically speaking, you own the final say on the namespace,
> so you make the decision in case of conflict :-)

Not sure!  Before posting I re-read the governance document, in
case my questions were already answered there.  According to this
document, I do own the final say on hostnames in the ocaml.org domain.
But the Github ocaml/ organization & namespace is something different,
not covered (yet?) in the governance document.

I suspect that, as one of the admins of this organization, I wield
considerable technical power there as well.  But I definitely don't
want to misuse or abuse it, hence my questions re: policy and
procedure.


> So far, the policy has been any project that is reasonably needed
> for the operation of the ocaml.org infrastructure. Some of them are
> obvious: [...]
> When we first created the GitHub org, it was also the home for
> some popular community libraries: [...]
> More recently of course, the OCaml compiler and its tools have 
> also started moving over: [...]
> 
> So now that we have been using GitHub for a few years, there
> is quite an array of libraries on the ocaml/ organisation, and
> possibly time to do a garbage collection and disaggregate the
> namespace if necessary.

As far as the number of projects in ocaml/ remains tractable
(e.g. tens, not hundreds), it's OK to host all of them and not
worry too much about reorganization.  My (hypothetical) concern is:
what happens do if, say, all projects from forge.ocamlcore.org ask to
migrate to the /ocaml/ organization on Github?

> It would be great to keep the [libraries formerly in the compiler
> distribution] underneath the ocaml/ organisation.  There is also
> precedent for moving important core libraries such as Zarith into
> ocaml/

Duly noted.  But Nums and Zarith were two easy examples :-)

Concretely: I'll try to work on the otherlibs/num -> ocaml/num[s]
migration in the coming weeks, and will ask for help if I can't
manage.  For other possible "immigrant" projects, let's give other
people on this list time to think about it.

Best,

- Xavier