Le Wed, 29 Jun 2016, Gabriel Scherer a écrit : > I'm a bit frustrated with the time it takes for the OCaml ecosystem to > catch up with the 4.03 release -- which has been released two months ago > now, on April 25. > > ... > > Do you agree that this is a problem? What could we do to fix that?
I agree, I wanted to update my packages after the release and had to wait for oasis to work on 4.03; some other dependencies of projects of mine also took some time. Even now, I just stumbled upon Coq 8.5 not compiling, so I'd say the problem is real. > > When I started writing this email I intended to send it to Damien Doligez, > as the release manager of the compiler distribution, with the following > suggestion: maybe we could have a *much longer* beta-testing period for > OCaml versions that would be used not (only) for finding bugs in the new > version, but also to let important pieces of the ecosystem update to the > new version. Say, at least a month. We could have a fixed set of software > that we monitor, or in fact all of what's in OPAM, and delay the release > until they get updated/fixed or their OPAM version bounds get fixed. (Aha, > a Platform indeed!) As usual, the issue is: what set of packages is monitored, and who chooses? > Does that sound like a reasonable idea to you? Should we monitor all OPAM, > or only a subset? I think OWS should be used to see which packages are broken on the new release, indeed. I would propose the following workflow: - the beta-testing period, feature-frozen, starts (for some time) - shortly, maintainers whose package doesn't compile (we know thanks to OWS) are emailed to be informed of the problem - if, at the end of the beta-testing period (just before the release) a package that used to build on the previous release, but does not build anymore, is modified by opam-repo maintainers so it gets an upper bound on the OCaml version. This means that, if no action is taken, a package that does not build on 4.04 would have "ocaml-version < 4.04". New releases of this package, that hopefully fix the build on 4.04, would lift this barrier. It would also prevent opam from falling back to old, incompatible versions of a package in case of conflict with some other library. New packages are checked for build on most versions of OCaml; I think old packages should also be checked for compatibility with newer versions of OCaml so that the appropriate bound check is added. I don't add those bounds myself on my own packages (too tedious to do it on 15 old releases), so it should probably be automated. Cheers! -- Simon Cruanes http://weusepgp.info/ key 49AA62B6, fingerprint 949F EB87 8F06 59C6 D7D3 7D8D 4AC0 1D08 49AA 62B6
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