maintenance intent of MirageOS packages

[Hannes Mehnert]

Dear everyone,

as you may have seen I'm involved in a project to push opam packages out 
of the main opam-repository to improve the performance for everyone 
(read more at 
https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/proposed-package-archiving-policy-for-the-opam-repository/).

Now, we're getting closer to "Phase 3" - which means that packages 
marked by maintainers with "x-maintenance-intent: ..." can be archived. 
Since this is opt-in, I'm keen to have as many opam packages specify 
this extra field as possible.

Turning at the MirageOS GitHub organization and the mirage project 
itself, I'm curious whether anyone has reservations against stating 
"only the latest version is supported". So, is anyone keen to retain and 
maintain earlier versions (if yes, please indicate why and for which 
packages).

If there's no objection, I'll push forward with the above for the 
mirage-related packages (I won't touch those big packages used 
elsewhere, but only provide issues and/or pull requests for things like 
cohttp, irmin, uri, capnp-rpc, alcotest, cow, ..). I'm more into 
packages such as mirage, tcpip, mirage-net, mirage-net-xen, ... and put 
a 'x-maintenance-intent: [ "(latest)" ]' from next week on unless 
someone stops me.

Another related question is about packages that are no longer 
maintained, I already marked some of these with "flags: deprecated" in 
the main opam-repository.

It helps if everyone who authored and/or maintains packages to push 
these fields into the opam-repository and the opam files in the 
repositories.

Two notes about that: only the latest release of a package needs to have 
the "x-maintenance-intent" field. And, if there's a reverse dependency 
on an earlier version (that won't fall under the maintenance intent), 
this version will be kept. We don't want to introduce package 
installation failures due to missing dependencies.

If you're interested, take a look at the field specification 
https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/blob/master/governance/policies/archiving.md#specification-of-the-x--fields-used-in-the-archiving-process

And follow the opam-repository tag on discuss: 
https://discuss.ocaml.org/tag/opam-repository

As said above, I'll push forward with the mirage packages starting next 
week unless someone has objections.


Best,

Hannes