On 19 May 2021, at 18:38, David Allsopp <david.allsopp(a)metastack.com> wrote:
Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> (I've added a few opam devs to CC)
>
> On Tue, May 18, 2021 at 10:14:41PM +0200, Miro HronĨok wrote:
>> opam orphan 1
> weeks ago
>
> I didn't notice that opam had been orphaned. This package is the tool
> used for source packaging of OCaml packages under $HOME
> (
https://opam.ocaml.org/).
>
> I don't especially like language-specific tools for managing packages,
> because of the usual problems that have been widely discussed elsewhere
> and it's not profitable to rehash them again. This is my personal view.
>
> The question is if we want to keep this in Fedora or not? ie. As an
> official Fedora package versus something that opam maintainers would
> provide themselves as a download.
Thanks for the heads-up - this very week I've wanted to see what could be done
to get opam into EPEL, so discovering it's orphaned in Fedora is a bit of a blow!
We'd be happy to take on its maintenance. IIUC it needs to be readopted by August
when F35 is branched, or does an orphaned package get dropped earlier than that?
FWIW, the aim from the OCaml Community perspective is that opam is installed and
maintained by the OS's native package manager, so we'd obviously prefer it to
stay
that way.
Likewise, to echo David I'm happy to co-maintain with him in Fedora.
However, was there was a previous maintainer who dropped it and can
we assist anyone else who would like to maintain it? We've obviously
got a scaling problem with the number of distros we support and test
at the moment from the core (and small) opam development team.
Richard W. M. Jones wrote:
I don't especially like language-specific tools for managing
packages,
because of the usual problems that have been widely discussed
elsewhere and it's not profitable to rehash them again. This is my
personal view.
I'd like to push back against this, since there's an obvious need for
language-specific managers since every single language has one. The
reason opam exists is that it supports _all versions_ of OCaml libraries
published, and so the database allows developers to immediately assemble
a reasonable universe of packages for their purposes.
Fedora packages serve a different need, which are to find a single
set of OCaml libraries and a single compiler version which can build
packages for applications written in OCaml. In the medium term we could
use the metadata in opam-repository to generate RPMs that are well-meshed
with Fedora's standards, and help with compiler version upgrades by
finding a set of versions of OCaml packages that are compatible with
the package set.
regards,
Anil