[ocaml-platform] Does Core change too often?

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

Core changing regularly at the moment is fine.  There aren't many
third-party packages that depend on it, and we can establish lower
bounds.  Note that the constraints aren't a long-term solution for
compatibility, as you can't have multiple simultaneous library
installations at present.

The short-term annoyance is that all the dependent libraries are
tied to Core versioning, and there is needless churn there.  For
example, both Fieldslib and Comparelib had no substantial changes
in 109.09.00 with respect to 109.08.00:
https://github.com/janestreet/comparelib/commit/b4b36651591d3ebfb970bd22cca8daa803bca93b

The biggest impact for this is felt with type_conv, which invariably
results in a complete recompilation cycle.  I'd be interested in how
you feel about independent versioning of some of these libraries
in the longer term.

-anil



On 15 Feb 2013, at 03:17, Yaron Minsky <yminsky at janestreet.com> wrote:

> Right now, the Core suite of libraries changes a lot --- we have a new
> release of everything every week.  The changes on a given week are
> small, but there are always changes.
> 
> I can imagine this being something of a problem for OPAM.  If packages
> specify specific revisions of the Core suite, then we're going to have
> a massive version mismatch problem, where no two libraries can agree
> on the version of Core that they need.
> 
> I have no obvious ideas as to how to solve this.  Does anyone else
> have ideas?  Should we simply encourage packagers to specify a
> lower-bound constraint on the Core libraries?
> 
> y
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