[opam-devel] call for help: opam history

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

Sounds good to me.

-anil

On 1 Oct 2014, at 10:41, Fabrice Le Fessant <Fabrice.Le_fessant at inria.fr> wrote:

> 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