[opam-devel] versioning of Core packages

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

I think we do need to figure out a better versioning story for the various Core packages in OPAM. While there is a fair amount of change every week, there are a lot of packages that never materially change between versions.  This is causing a lot of rebuilding churn.  In particular, as useful libraries such as Jenga and type_conv get used more and more, it places Core right at the heart of the build graph.

Jeremie, Yaron, what's your view on decoupling a few of the more core libraries and bumping their versions independently of Core itself?  I'm thinking of the syntax extensions mainly.

Note that this could be as simple as not including them in a weekly release, and bumping their versions up to the latest if a change does happen.  Or, an alternative is to specify the constraints in OPAM such that an older interface that hasn't changed would be included in the constraint, and hence not trigger an upgrade unless required.

-anil