[opam-devel] call for help: opam history

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

On 30 Sep 2014, at 14:38, Thomas Gazagnaire <thomas at gazagnaire.org> wrote:

> 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.

My memory is hazy, but looking over IRC logs reveals quite a few conversations
between the three of us (Frederic, you and me) about the best structure for the
repository.  It's safe to say that Frederic was very involved in that process,
even if it's not directly reflected in the repository stats.

-anil