[opam-devel] call for help: opam history

[Thomas Gazagnaire]

Hi,

>> Once that document is good enough (ideally in a couple of weeks), it will replace http://opam.ocaml.org/about.html as I've heard people complaining about it multiple times already.
> 
> Could you be more explicit about the complains that you have heard
> about this page ?

Mainly that people who contributed to the project were not acknowledge properly on that page. Asking people to contribute to the page should help fixing this (hopefully).

> 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. 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 ?

I was not involved in the DORM project so I don't know that part of the story -- I'll let you, Roberto and the other people involved filling this gap by directly editing the wiki page. About Frederic: he certainly contributed to import a lot of packages at the beginning (I found [1] and [2] for instance) but he then spent most of his time working on the initial opam prototype if I remember correctly. Could be useful to ask him directly but I don't have his new email ... Anil's stats seems to indicate that very early Anil and I were the two main contributors of opam-repository (although it seems I was very good at deleting stuff ...). The v0 tag in opam-repository (from Jun 2012) points to [3] and contains ~20 packages but a later commit[4] shows a lot of files generated by Frederic.

Best,
Thomas

[1] https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/commit/2def559b335014cdd9bb72f01155d1fe53407890
[2] https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/pull/6
[3] https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/tree/6200d7c8eb2ec2954ac24c485e0ad09120e6a50f/opam
[4] https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/tree/64dee064c69bae378af85f90e2a8dc03e25b0090/opam