[Fedora-packaging] MinGW subpackages of OCaml packages

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Dec 09, 2008 at 09:41:41AM -0600, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> >>>>> "RWMJ" == Richard W M Jones <rjones at redhat.com> writes:
> 
> RWMJ> Everyone's happy with me to go ahead with this?
> 
> You have to torture reality pretty badly to assume that silence
> somehow implies happiness.  Maybe people are just annoyed to see this
> come up again.

I was a bit surprised there was no response from the first email, and
the second email was an opportunity to bring this to peoples'
attention again.  I haven't made any changes yet to the packages,
precisely because I wanted to hear what people had to say and ensure
there was general agreement first.

> So here's one from someone who was never all that comfortable with all
> of this Windows support in the first place:
> 
> During the discussions you were somewhat adamant about the limited number
> of Windows library packages that your proposal would entail.  You
> quoted numbers and relatively small size requirements as evidence that
> this was no big deal.

This is still the case.  Even with all the packages we've done, plus
the OCaml subpackages, the whole of mingw is under a gigabyte (src +
noarch RPMs).  At the time we estimated 800 MB, so we have gone
slightly over our estimate, but at the same time we've expanded the
scope to include C++ libraries like gtkmm.  Still, I wouldn't really
say that 1 GB is excessive.

We have found a non-virt co-maintainer (Levente Farkas) for all the
base packages too.

>  Now you're talking about taking what is
> something of a niche package category (ocaml packages) and adding a
> second level of niche-itude to them (windows cross-compilation
> environment for ocaml packages) and I'm wondering if the overhead of
> these packages was included in your initial figures and whether you
> actually think that anyone other than you will actually use them.

Yes, people in the OCaml community are excited by this.  That may not
be a community that is very visible to Fedora packagers I admit.

> I mean, sure, if you're a packager and you can get someone to review
> your packages, you can basically turn Fedora into your own personal
> distro, with the specialized packages that you want already in there.
> I don't think that's a bad thing.  Even better if other people happen
> to benefit from those packages.  At some point, however, someone needs
> to actually think about how the cost of this compares to the benefits.
> 
> I do have a couple of other hands in the fray, though:
> 
> As a package reviewer, I think you've already dropped a metric ass-ton
> of packages on the review queue and I shudder to think that you would
> consider actually adding more without spending at least a solid month
> helping us review packages.  Avoiding having to review another pile of
> whatever-for-windows packages would be great.

It's true that I have been negligent in doing very little review work.
So I will try to change that.

> As a Packaging Committee member, I would want you to at least add
> sufficient comments to these specfiles to discourage anyone who might
> want to package an ocaml module from using them as examples unless
> they somehow want to maintain them for Windows as well.  After taht
> long review process we have what I think are a good set of ocaml
> package guidelines with nice templates, and now you're proposing to
> take the bulk of those packages away from that.

OK, this is fair too.  I usually encourage OCaml packagers to start
out with:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Image:Packaging_OCaml_ocaml-foolib.spec

linked from:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/OCaml

That doesn't currently include a mingw subpackage, and nor should it.

Note that there are currently 70 OCaml packages in Fedora, and only a
handful of those (10) were proposed to be cross-compiled, 2 of those
being the cross-compiler itself.

Rich.