Benedikt Meurer <[email protected]> writes:
> Dear caml-list,
>
> During the last year or two it seems that time and interest in OCaml
> maintenance from the official OCaml development team is diminishing. It takes
> several months to get a patch reviewed (if at all), which is quite
> frustrating for OCaml contributors and even worse for OCaml users. I suspect
> that this is one of the top reasons why there are only a few active
> contributors to OCaml (and the number of active users, at least on the
> mailing list, is declining).
>
> I understand that INRIA does not necessarily pay people for full time
> maintenance jobs on OCaml (and Coq), and the official dev team is probably
> already doing as much as possible to maintain OCaml. Given that OCaml is such
> a nice language with a lot of useful frameworks available, it is too sad to
> see it loosing ground just because of it's closed development process and
> lack of time of the official team.
>
> I'd therefore propose to open up OCaml development to a wider range of
> developers / contributors, to ensure that OCaml will be ready for the
> (functional programming) future. There are already various "OCaml forks" in
> the wild, with different goals and patch sets, so simply starting another
> fork would be rather useless. Instead I'd suggest to bundle efforts in a new
> "OCaml community fork", which is always based on the most recent upstream
> OCaml release (starting point would be 3.12.1 for now), and takes care to
> review and integrate pending patches as well as developing and testing new
> features. Let's say we'd name the fork "OCaml-ng", then we'd try to release a
> new patch set every month or two, based on the official OCaml release, i.e.
> "ocaml-3.12.1+ng201112" and so on, to get early testing and feedback (should
> work together closely with the Debian/Ubuntu/etc. OCaml maintainers).
>
> With this process, OCaml upstream could merge (tested) patches from OCaml-ng
> once they proved working in the wild, and thereby
>
> 1. maintenance overhead for INRIA people is reduced,
> 2. maintenance status of OCaml would be way better,
> 3. there would be a lot less frustration for possible contributors, and
> 4. users benefit from a better and more up to date OCaml.
>
> Now that does of course raise a few questions:
>
> 1. What is the opinion of the official development team / INRIA on this?
> 2. Who would help with the community fork?
> 3. What about infrastructure?
>
> Feedback and suggestions are welcome.
>
> Benedikt
+1 for getting patches better/faster reviewd and included.
I'm still waiting to hear back for my Bigarray patch to support 31bit
integers.
MfG
Goswin
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