> > 3. What about infrastructure? > Short answer: Ocamlforge ( http://forge.ocamlcore.org/ ) for mailing list, bug tracking and homepage, and Gitorious ( https://gitorious.org/ ) for code repository hosting.
Long answer: In my experience, the most important things for a relatively-small-scale free software project are, in decreasing order of importance: 1. a place where to drop code that people can look at (and follow development, etc.) 2. a mailing-list 3. a bug tracker (mailing-list can do that but you risk forgetting old bugs) 4. some static web pages describing your project to the newcomer Regarding (1), Github is all the hype today. I would personally advise against it, or at least about "just github", because: - it is not free software (compared to free software alternatives such as gitorious : http://gitorious.org/ ), and I dislike hosting a free software project on a proprietary platform, although most people seems ok with it and that's their choice - it does not provide a mailing-list, which is critical; in fact, mailing-lists tend to be replaced in github-centric (or gitorious-centric for the matter) projects tend by pull-request discussions that are by nature sparse, less effective, not very well archived, and more generally a bad way to discuss even code contributions The OCaml Forge ( http://forge.ocamlcore.org/ ) provides hosting for OCaml software which fulfills all requirement above. Arguably, it is a bit heavy for code hosting and the bug tracker interface is less welcoming than others -- in particular Github bugtracker is very refined. I would consider Ocamlforge, with code hosting disabled and a central Gitorious repository as a very good choice for any OCaml free software project. There are other non-OCaml-specific forges that provide mailing-lists and run on free software. Launchpad ( https://launchpad.net/ ) may be compelling if you are ready to use the Bazaar DCVS, and Sourceforge ( http://sourceforge.net/ ) has recently launched a renewed open source forge ( http://sourceforge.net/p/allura/wiki/Allura%20Wiki/ ) with apparently good support for the mainstream control version systems (git, hg, svn). On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 9:25 AM, Benedikt Meurer < [email protected]> wrote: > 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 > > -- > Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management and archives: > https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list > Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners > Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs > > -- Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management and archives: https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
