[opam-devel] call for help: opam history

[Roberto Di Cosmo]

Hi Sylvain,
   if you look at http://opam.ocaml.org/about.html you'll find a direct link to
http://zenika.github.io/DORM/ with more recent and pertinent information than
the talk given by Pierre Queinnec at the end of 2010; it was an R&D project that
got partially funded to support the development of industrial tools for package
based software repositories relying on the know-how and technology we
(Mancoosi/PPS/Irill) built over the past ten years.

I will not comment on the Java-specific part of it, even if I'm sure we
functional programmers would love to learn how lame Maven came out from
our analysis (opam-repository, with its red cells on ows.irill.org
is a gem in comparison).

DORM's outcome on the OCaml side is indeed opam: if you dig into opam's git
repo you'll find CUDF and Dose used as a foundation since the very beginning,
not to mention the time we spent here providing background information, 
answering questions and solving issues with the algorithms, which is sadly
not traced into the source code.

I'm forwarding this thread to other people in the team that are not on opam-devel
so we can try to come up with more precise factual elements: getting the story,
and the credits, right, is very important in all OSS projects, as that's one
of the factors that contribute to make everybody willing to continue to contribute.

Nevertheless, I'm afraid this will have to wait, as we are all under
a lot of pressure in this moment, and cannot commit to firm deadlines (hey,
that's OSS after all :-))

--
Roberto

On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 02:02:04PM +0200, Sylvain Le Gall wrote:
> I tried to look for DORM documentation and the only thing I can find is:
> http://www.irill.org/blog/homepage
> IRILL days 2010
> 16h00-16h30 DORM, the missing tool to persist your deliveries, Pierre
> Queinnec (Zenika)
> 
> There are no more data on that (no slides). Given the background of
> Zenika, this look a lot like something Java related.
> 
> I am sure Fabrice is right about the fact that some ideas of opam were
> in DORM proposal, but given the lack of documentation and the kind
> tools it seems to be from the few hints you can gather I would not
> mention it. This can be misleading.
> 
> 
> 2014-09-30 12:34 GMT+02:00 Anil Madhavapeddy <anil at recoil.org>:
> > On 30 Sep 2014, at 10:47, Fabrice Le Fessant <Fabrice.Le_fessant at inria.fr> wrote:
> >>
> >> From my point of view, the new presentation starts too late: the first
> >> ideas of OPAM were in DORM, and the DORM proposal was submitted to the
> >> French state in 2010. The main idea of DORM was to develop a new
> >> package manager for OCaml, using the DOSE technology from the Mancoosi
> >> team. Then, Yaron contacted OCamlPro in mi-november 2011 to put more
> >> manpower on the design of new package manager for OCaml.
> >
> > This sounds like ideal for the start of the history.  Why not edit it
> > in yourself as Thomas suggested?  Did DORM get funded btw?  Linking to
> > any other outputs from the project would also help round out the history.
> >
> >> Also, in the opam-repository description, I thought the first 200 packages were
> >> mostly packaged by Frederic Tuong, who spent almost 6 months doing
> >> only that. Am I wrong ?
> >
> > This was an excellent excuse to try gitinspector out:
> > http://www.recoil.org/~avsm/opam-repo-stats.html
> >
> > The stats may be misleading if there was rebasing going on in the early
> > days, so take those with a pinch of salt.  The tool did output month
> > by month commit statistics which may help jog memories though.
> > (see the "history timeline" section of the page)
> >
> > -anil
> > _______________________________________________
> > opam-devel mailing list
> > opam-devel at lists.ocaml.org
> > http://lists.ocaml.org/listinfo/opam-devel
> _______________________________________________
> opam-devel mailing list
> opam-devel at lists.ocaml.org
> http://lists.ocaml.org/listinfo/opam-devel

-- 
Roberto Di Cosmo
 
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