[opam-devel] call for help: opam history

[Fabrice Le Fessant]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 6:42 PM, Thomas Gazagnaire
<thomas at gazagnaire.org> wrote:
>>>> 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).
>>
>> Wouldn't a simple list of contributors be enough ? Or should we really
>> investigate and measure the size of contributions ? How do you compare
>> the time I spent convincing people OPAM should be done, finding funds
>> and manpower, with the time other ones spent developing or
>> contributing packages ?
>
> There is no comparison to be done, I think it is useful to properly state how things happened at the time. I've tried to dig into my emails, commits message, IRC logs and my bad memory to write the first draft, and as you can see in the topic of that email I'm calling for help to make things more accurate :-) So of course we should mention the initial work done to fund the project (both DORM and OCamlPro resources).

My point is just that people are always unhappy with how contributions
to a given project are displayed. I would have just added a list of
contributors to the About page, but if the goal is also to have a nice
history for opam, that's fine.

>> Funnily, my own contribution was to move the count from 24 to... 0 and
>> then 1 on Jun 5 :-)
>
> Haha, I'm not the only one trying to delete stuff then :-)
>
> Thanks for the package stats, very useful. Did you take into account the format changes in the repository in your stats? And about the time spent on code/repo by Frederic and me, I just remember we spent a lot of time working on both at the same time (as we were fixing design issues while creating new packages, and Frederic developed a quite sophisticated system to generate package meta-data). I'll correct this part of history later this week.

I just counted the number of files in the opam/ subdirectory (the
equivalent of packages/ at the time) after each commit. Indeed, there
are many commits changing the format of these files, to be consistent
with a change in the format expected by the tool, so it does not take
into account all that work.

@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.

--Fabrice

-- 
Fabrice LE FESSANT
Chercheur en Informatique
INRIA Paris Rocquencourt -- OCamlPro
Programming Languages and Distributed Systems