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

[Alain Frisch]

On 30/06/2016 03:56, Alain Frisch wrote:
> OCamlPro's opam builder (
> http://opam.ocamlpro.com/builder/html/report-last.html ) really needs to
> be more advertised and its UI a bit polished to encourage people to
> actually look at it.  Also a report per maintainer (with emails sent
> automatically?) could be useful.

Here is some wishlist for this tool:

  - Add trunk testing: this is what will put pressure for people to 
continuously upgrade their packages.  Ideally, it would also show the 
(date of the) latest successful build on trunk.  Same for release 
branches once they are forked.

  - Make the grid more narrow to fit more versions on a screen (e.g. 
abbreviate Broken Deps to "Deps") and show more recent versions 
(including trunk) to the left.

  - By default, show only the latest version of each package.

  - Add a mode where packages are grouped by maintainer.

  - Try to make the errors more visible.  E.g. for 
http://opam.ocamlpro.com/builder/html/github/github.1.0.0/3b48ac1bc360931d68afa4e126d96b44, 
the section "=== ERROR while compiling github.1.0.0 ==" could be moved 
to the top of the screen.

   - There could also be heuristics to detect the error and show 
directly in the main report grid the category. For instance, 
http://opam.ocamlpro.com/builder/html/acgtk/acgtk.1.0b/764d15d569e342c5ee761551e398fb38 
is simply about a new warning and "-warn-error A" in the package.

  - It would be useful to force building package even if they claim they 
are not compatible with the latest version (or trunk).  For instance, I 
was curious about why ocamlnet.4.0.4 did not build with 4.03.  (In case 
people wonder, the first problem comes from the new error on multiple 
definitions of exceptions with the same name; this error was introduced 
on trunk in 2014 IIRC.  The fix for ocamlnet is just to remove one line.)


Alain