[ocaml-platform] Bytes

[Gabriel Scherer]

On Sun, Jun 26, 2016 at 3:46 PM, Fabrice Le Fessant <
Fabrice.Le_fessant at inria.fr> wrote:

> To the best of my knowledge, that package was already in OPAM before your
> bytes version was added in `ocamlfind`. It was then removed.


For the record, the idea of a compatibility package emerged in a discussion
on the public #ocaml IRC channel on May 3, 2014. It was implemented on May
4 and whitequark and myself contacted Gerd Stolpmann to know if he
preferred it see it included in ocamlfind on May 5, and Gerd included it in
ocamlfind SVN on the same day -- but the next ocamlfind release came later,
on June 25.

Pierre Chambart create his independent version on May 10 and integrated it
in OPAM on May 22. I'm sure he was not aware of the ongoing bytes-compat
work. It's a near-miss, unfortunately, as he connected on-and-off on the
IRC channel around that time (but not during bytes-compat discussions), and
Thomas Gazagnaire had a patch in ocamlfind on May 5 as well.

On Sun, Jun 26, 2016 at 3:46 PM, Fabrice Le Fessant <
Fabrice.Le_fessant at inria.fr> wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 25, 2016 at 6:55 PM Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> and I know that others have (partially) reimplemented this, e.g. Pierre
>> Chambart's ocaml-bytes:
>>
>>   https://github.com/chambart/ocaml-bytes
>>
>
> To the best of my knowledge, that package was already in OPAM before your
> bytes version was added in `ocamlfind`. It was then removed.
>
> It was all the more a bad decision that now, we suffer from packages
> wrongly adding `ocamlfind {build}` dependencies in OPAM, forgetting that
> they actually depend on the `bytes` library in `ocamlfind`.
>
>  Note that `ocp-build` comes with its own compatibility library
> `ocplib-compat` (it provides a `StringCompat` module that can be opened to
> provide the same String/Bytes API for all OCaml versions). But the
> rationale here was that it was used by `ocp-build` itself, and used
> `ocp-build` to compile itself.
>
> --Fabrice
>
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