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/Camlp4http://brion.inria.fr/gallium/index.php/Camlp4
--
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my OCaml programming blog: http://camltastic.blogspot.com/
Fedora now supports 64 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#)
http://cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_and_fedora
