[opam-devel] call for help: opam history

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

On 30 Sep 2014, at 13:41, Roberto Di Cosmo <roberto at dicosmo.org> wrote:

> 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).

That's very interesting -- is there a central repository of Maven package
metadata as well that?  I thought it was a standalone build tool.  It would
be very useful to have some sort of comparison to other languages to get a
sense of how well we're doing (even if it's a very rough metric).

I guess if we're going to do more work on OCaml Java then we need to start
poking at the Java packaging ecosystem.  I'm not terribly eager :-)

> 
> 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.

Yeah, this aspect is very important.  The git repository is just a guideline;
there were many IRC and personal conversations that drove the early design.
We can just iterate on the history until everyone's happy, and then maintain
it moving forward every few months when new features show up.

-anil