[opam-devel] current opam-repository policy : who can modify a package description

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

On 22 Feb 2016, at 15:42, Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> For ocamlbuild, I have written in the release How-to (the description
> of things that have to be done when creating a new release) that the
> upstream opam file of the last existing release should be checked for
> packaging-policy changes:
>  https://github.com/ocaml/ocamlbuild/blob/master/howto/release.adoc#synchronizing-the-local-and-remote-opam-files
> 
> I would encourage other maintainers to adopt such a policy. Checking
> once at release time is an acceptable amount of work for software that
> gets released every few months, and it ensures that this problem does
> not arise. Of course, this is not a silver bullet, other developers
> have different packaging habits that make release for frequent or
> numerous (Daniel tries to script it as much as possible because he has
> many small packages) and they may prefer another way of working with
> packaging changes.

Very sensible!  There is also the issue of sweeping changes in the
repository affecting upstream `opam` files.  This most notably is
happening right now with the sexplib-camlp4->ppx_sexp_conv changes,
and so I asked Jeremie Diminio to create a CHANGES file in the
opam-repository:

https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/blob/master/CHANGES.md

It's not ideal, but at least there's a recorded place to look at
for how to deal with an old `opam` file in your distribution and
updating it to the latest and greatest packages.

Anil