From rjones at redhat.com Mon Aug 25 19:31:43 2008 From: rjones at redhat.com (Richard W.M. Jones) Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:31:43 +0100 Subject: OCaml 3.10.2 Message-ID: <20080825193143.GB1226@amd.home.annexia.org> I would really like to upgrade OCaml in EPEL 5 to version 3.10.2. The main reason is that much of the other software we'd like to ship with EPEL needs the new camlp4 [1], which was introduced with OCaml >= 3.10.0. (EPEL ships with OCaml 3.09.3 at present). http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/repoview/ocaml.html Backporting the software to the older OCaml is going to be very complicated. The two versions of camlp4 (< 3.10.0 and >= 3.10.0) are really incompatible. The newer one is much more featureful and is rapidly displacing older versions. Backporting just the newer camlp4 to the older compiler is also considered intractable, since the compiler and camlp4 are closely linked. Now the downside to doing this is that it would require any OCaml users of EPEL 5 to recompile their software. This may just be a simple recompile, but there are also worst-case scenarios such as people using and relying on the old camlp4 who may have to make modifications of their software. So it's quite a big disruption for everyone. I'm also very aware that EPEL is supposed to be long-term stable. Comments? Rich. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camlp4 http://brion.inria.fr/gallium/index.php/Camlp4 -- Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat http://et.redhat.com/~rjones Read my OCaml programming blog: http://camltastic.blogspot.com/ Fedora now supports 64 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#) http://cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_and_fedora From lemenkov at gmail.com Mon Aug 25 20:10:14 2008 From: lemenkov at gmail.com (Peter Lemenkov) Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:10:14 +0400 Subject: OCaml 3.10.2 In-Reply-To: <20080825193143.GB1226@amd.home.annexia.org> References: <20080825193143.GB1226@amd.home.annexia.org> Message-ID: 2008/8/25, Richard W.M. Jones : > I would really like to upgrade OCaml in EPEL 5 to version 3.10.2. > > The main reason is that much of the other software we'd like to ship > with EPEL needs the new camlp4 [1], which was introduced with OCaml >= > 3.10.0. (EPEL ships with OCaml 3.09.3 at present). As for me, I never afraid of updating to latest version :) Seriously speaking, the main difficulty in maintaining packages, is the total absence of feedback from users *before* any updates. -- With best regards! From opensource at till.name Tue Aug 26 08:51:38 2008 From: opensource at till.name (Till Maas) Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:51:38 +0200 Subject: OCaml 3.10.2 In-Reply-To: <20080825193143.GB1226@amd.home.annexia.org> References: <20080825193143.GB1226@amd.home.annexia.org> Message-ID: <200808261051.38865.opensource@till.name> On Mon August 25 2008, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > Now the downside to doing this is that it would require any OCaml > users of EPEL 5 to recompile their software. This may just be a > simple recompile, but there are also worst-case scenarios such as > people using and relying on the old camlp4 who may have to make > modifications of their software. So it's quite a big disruption for > everyone. I'm also very aware that EPEL is supposed to be long-term > stable. > > Comments? How about doing the update when EPEL is based on RHEL 5.3. Then there could be also an announcement that EPEL updated it and at this time RHEL/CentOS users will expect bigger updates that normally. Regards, Till -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 827 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. URL: