[ocaml-platform] Is it taking too long for OCaml software to become 4.03-compatible? Would release process changes help?

[Thomas Gazagnaire]

The main issue with 4.03 is that killing camlp4 took a bit longer than expected. Things starts to stabilise now that all the ppx infrastructure is in place, much more used than before, and than maintainers did the ppx bump (that at least the case for most of the mirage breakage on 4.03).

The jump from 4.01 to 4.02 was much easier in comparison. I think that’s instability is a one-off. It could make sense to define a set of packages and check that they compile fine before tagging 4.04 though.

> Finally, there has been all this work on the "OPAM weather services", continuous build of opam packages etc., plus the work that Damien is doing around release time. It doesn't seem to have worked very well for 4.03. Who is monitoring this stuff? Do we need to fix them to make them work better, or to fix our process to use them better? To be honest, I'm never looking at these services -- I just don't think of using them. Can I get an email whenever they detect that my stuff is broken? Say I'm a new package manager, are there guidelines somewhere on what the best practices are and what I should do?

OPAM weather service will not help you very much here as it doesn’t try to build packages. 

Best,
Thomas