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

[Daniel Bünzli]

Le mercredi, 29 juin 2016 à 20:39, Gabriel Scherer a écrit :
> TL;DR:
> 1. We need to have a "test:" field in OPAM metadata and get packages to use it.

This already exists. But in a broken form in my opinion; see build-test: field. I hope OPAM v2 will propose something better (simply build: and test:), I talked with Louis about this.

However note that most failures are build failures anyways — notably because a lot of the packages are affected, sometimes without knowing (rec deps) — by the pre-processing cancer that `ppx` and `camlp4` are.  

Also one other thing to note is that people stupidly have -warn-error activated in their tarballs. It should be communicated more effectively that this should absolutely not be done as it is difficult to check this by the OPAM repository maintainers.

> 3. If such a weekly build is effective, the policy of "stay in beta as long as allegedly-installable OPAM packages fail to build on the new release" would be much easier to accept.
I don't think that's reasonable. The responsability here is the one of the package developers — refrain from using hacks that are not able to pass a major version of the OCaml compiler — and the package maintainers (often the same person) who need to actually test and fix the packages they maintain once an OCaml beta is out; this should be especially true for people who distribute cancer inducing substances (but yes it's nice if we can be notified automatically). I don't think that irresponsible people should be allowed to hold the whole eco-system back because of their behaviour.

FWIW AFAIK none of ~20 packages I maintain needed any kind of fixing for 4.03.

Best,  

Daniel