OCaml 3.10.2

[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).

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

[Peter Lemenkov]

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.

[Till Maas]

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