[ocaml-platform] Does Core change too often?

[Yaron Minsky]

But nix doesn't fix the diamond dependency problem, does it?  If library a
depends on core 109.07 and b depends on 109.08, then an app that wants to
link in both a and b is in some real trouble.

Or am I missing something?
On Feb 15, 2013 6:37 AM, "Malcolm Matalka" <mmatalka at gmail.com> wrote:

> I get around this in Nix with chroot and building OCAMLPATH on the fly.
> On Feb 15, 2013 12:34 PM, "Anil Madhavapeddy" <anil at recoil.org> wrote:
>
>> OPAM has a strong dependency on ocamlfind at the moment, which doesn't
>> support multiple library versions.  OPAM could be extended to support
>> multiple installations (since the constraint model expresses it fine),
>> but would need to understand more of the build process too.
>>
>> There are some steps towards this already, such as the `.install` files
>> which automate binary installation/removal.  We were reluctant to put
>> any more in the first version in the interests of getting something out.
>>
>> -anil
>>
>> On 15 Feb 2013, at 11:21, Malcolm Matalka <mmatalka at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Right now, I think Core not being afraid to change frequently is good.
>> > I'd rather have that than a stale API that kind of sucks.  And I'd hate
>> > to have the public Core get out of synch with what Jane St uses
>> > internally because it increases the overhead for you which decreases the
>> > chance of timely releases.
>> >
>> > Multiple versions has not been a problem for me since I convert opam
>> > packages I'm interested in to Nix packages, and Nix handles multiple
>> > versions of installed packages just fine.  It's probably too late in the
>> > game for opam to have this style as well, I don't know anything about
>> > opam's design, but it's worked pretty well in Nix for me.
>> >
>> > Beyond that, I think good semantic versioning is probably key.  If the
>> > majority of Core changes are backwards compatible (I have no idea if
>> > this is the case) then installing the right package for a lot of the
>> > apps probably isn't so bad.
>> >
>> > /Malcolm
>> >
>> > Yaron Minsky <yminsky at janestreet.com> writes:
>> >
>> >> 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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