[opam-devel] call for help: opam history

[Fabrice Le Fessant]

Ok. Before modifying the document, I would like to suggest the
following overview:

1/ The Ancestors of OPAM (GODI and so on)
2/ The Foundations of OPAM (gathering several teams to work on OPAM)
3/ The Birth of OPAM (first implementations)
4/ The Rise of OPAM (first release and current situation)

Also, I would like to put some stress on the 4 main differences
between GODI and OPAM, as I see them. The 4 short-comings of GODI I
see that are fixed by OPAM are:
- sub-optimal installation solutions => use of CUDF/Dose
- complex user interface => simple "à la apt" interface
- complex repository management => simple github-based workflow
- no automatic Q/A on the repository => Travis + OWS

What do you think ?
--Fabrice








On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 7:11 PM, Anil Madhavapeddy <anil at recoil.org> wrote:
> On 30 Sep 2014, at 18:06, Fabrice Le Fessant <Fabrice.Le_fessant at inria.fr> wrote:
>>
>> @Anil: yes, I kind of remember that there was a tool to automatically
>> extract the meta-data from GODI packages and to translate it to
>> "descr" files. However, the work of filling OPAM files with build and
>> install instructions was not automated, to the best of my knowledge,
>> so Frederic had to build every package and check that it would work
>> well in OPAM. But of course, GODI should be credited, both for
>> providing an inspiration for OPAM (we built on the experience we had
>> of GODI and sometimes, of the problems we had with it) and for forcing
>> many developers to package nicely their programs and libraries, so
>> that we work of packaging them again was much more easy.
>
> Yes, I think that's right -- it was just the descriptions and metadata
> that were borrowed from GODI, with the build instructions being manually
> edited to add (e.g.) the prefix and make macros.  That was quite a bit of
> work...
>
> -anil
>



-- 
Fabrice LE FESSANT
Chercheur en Informatique
INRIA Paris Rocquencourt -- OCamlPro
Programming Languages and Distributed Systems