[CentOS-devel] RFC: OCaml SIG

[Jim Perrin]

On 11/19/2014 07:20 AM, Jon Ludlam wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'd like to propose a new SIG for the OCaml language.
> 
> OCaml is an industrial strength programming language supporting functional, imperative and object-oriented styles. It has in recent years seen a marked increase in development activity, particularly in the compiler itself [1], core libraries [2] and developer tools [3]. Many of these newer libraries and features are already dependencies of a number of large upstream projects [4].
> 
> The version of OCaml in CentOS 6 is quite old (3.11.2, released in Jan 2010), and even that in CentOS 7 is fairly old (4.00.1, released in October 2012). I see the OCaml SIG providing the current stable compiler (4.02.1 at time of writing), and a selection of useful libraries and developer tools. This could then be used as a basis for other applications or SIGs to build upon - for example, it would make CentOS a good platform for building Unikernels [5] and it would be helpful in getting the Xapi Project suite of daemons [4] into one of the virtualisation/cloud SIGs. We actually already have a number of specs that are built for CentOS 6 which could make a good starting point [6].
> 
> A number of people have already agreed that they are interested and may be able to help (all CC'd):
> 
> From OCaml Labs (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/ocamllabs/):
> - Anil Madhavapeddy
> - Thomas Gazagnaire
> 
> From Jane Street (https://www.janestreet.com/):
> - Yaron Minsky
> - Dominick LoBraico
> 
> From Citrix (https://www.citrix.com/):
> - Me
> - Euan Harris
> 
> From OCamlPro (http://www.ocamlpro.com/):
> - Louis Gesbert
> 
> Comments?
> 
> Jon
> 
> [1] GADTs, record disambiguation, PPX extensions, immutable strings, etc.
> [2] ocaml-ctypes, Jane Street Core, the openmirage.org suite of libraries, etc.
> [3] opam, merlin, utop, etc.
> [4] https://github.com/xapi-project and http://ocsigen.org/
> [5] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628
> [6] https://github.com/xenserver/buildroot



This seems like a very good start to the proposal. A few
questions/statements:

1. What would you require in terms of distribution resources?  I'm
assuming git/koji access, so that you could build and distribute sig
packages.

1a. Would you require a mailing list or forum area?

2. What do you envision for release planning? Tracking upstream builds
vs a newer stabilized release?

3. How would releases be built/scheduled? Build every month, every 6
months, "when something happens upstream" ?

4. Testing? How would you validate package builds? Are test suites
included as part of the source, or would you consider implementing some
form of test suite criteria to ensure builds do the right thing?




-- 
Jim Perrin
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