[RFU] ocaml-4.00.1-1

[Damien Doligez]

Hi Corinna,

> Given what Yaakov said, wouldn't it make sense to provide the former
> ocaml libs and start using a versioned runtime lib approach?

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you mean, but providing several
versions of the libraries is not going to work because they are strongly
tied to the compiler version. If we want different versions of the
libraries to coexist, I think the only simple solution is to use a new
package name for each release of OCaml. That would probably force
every library to follow the same pattern, leading to a confusing
proliferation of packages.

The strong typing of OCaml gives strong guarantees to the users and
imposes strong constraints on linking. Stronger than can be handled
by "normal" package managers. This problem has been studied and solved
for the Debian package manager [1] but the solution is heavy-weight.
Nowadays, the preferred solution among OCaml developers is to use
OPAM, a dedicated package manager for OCaml programs and libraries.

-- Damien

[1] http://jfla.inria.fr/2010/actes/PDF/dogguy.pdf