[Fedora-packaging] Re: FESCo notes on OCaml guidelines change

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 01:19:28PM -0500, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> During the FESCo meeting, there was some question with regards to
> ocaml multilib-osity-ness.  I will admit to not fully understanding
> what's up here, but can we address this and either fix it or provide
> some response to fesco to assuage their concerns?

Yes, I just read through this and to be honest I don't understand
exactly what the issue is.  I turn off multilib on all the machines I
manage by excluding *.i?86 packages -- it causes more trouble than
it's worth.

My only general remark is this: It is _always_ preferred to build 64
bit binaries in OCaml if possible, even on reasonable architectures
like ppc64 where there are no extra registers.  The reason is to do
with the maximum length of strings and arrays which is a mere 16 MB on
32 bit archs, effectively unlimited on 64 bit.  You can in my
experience easily hit the 16 MB limit doing things like parsing large
XML documents or slurping in files.  Upstream have said they won't fix
this because they consider 32 bit architectures as legacy[1] ...

So how should I change the draft to make this clear?

Rich.

[1] http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2006/05/564ba833a1e582df77f59ad3e67f0bd3.en.html

PS. "ocaml seems to be overly complex" & other comments.  OCaml
emphasises software safety over other concerns.  The idea is that
software shouldn't break.  I know, it's a novel idea ... If you get to
fly on the Airbus A380, for example, the flight control software was
checked by automatic theorem provers written in OCaml (the code itself
isn't written in OCaml mind you).

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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