Debian OCaml Task Force

A collaborative effort to maintain Debian packages related to the OCaml programming language

Infrastructure

• Website: OCamlTaskForce (this wiki page)

• Alioth Project: http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-ocaml-maint/

• Documentation: see more stuff below

• Unix group: pkg-ocaml-maint (on Alioth only)

Interacting with the team

• Email contact: <debian-ocaml-maint@lists.debian.org>

• Public IRC channel: #debian-ocaml on irc.debian.org (OFTC)

• Joining: wanna join us? you are more than welcome! please send an introductory mail to our email contact above, and then request to join the Alioth Project using the legacy GForge mechanism

Usual roles

Current members:

• Sylvain Le Gall (gildor) is one alioth project admin, contributes/uploads team packages,

• Stéphane Glondu (glondu) is one alioth project admin, contributes to team packages and team-wide packaging tools and information pages,

• Mehdi Dogguy (mehdi) is one alioth project admin, contributes to team packages and team-wide packaging tools and information pages,

• ...
• add yourself here if you are a contributor of this team

Former active members (emeritus):

• Stefano Zacchiroli (zack) was a leading member, one alioth project admin, contributed/uploads team packages, took care team-wide packaging tools and information pages,

All team members are listed in the developer info box on the alioth project page.

Task description

The Debian OCaml Maintainers Task Force is up to package OCaml-related programs and libraries in Debian, to make as easy as possible the usage of such pieces of software.

Our usual activities include both routine packaging and maintenance of OCaml-related software and formalization in our policy of best practice for the OCaml packaging in Debian.

Get involved / future work

• getting ready for OCaml 3.12

• policy related stuff

• OCaml backports coordination page: OCamlBackports

• what about a camlp4-misc package?

• essay on OCaml link-time compatibility and Debian dependencies
  superseded by JFLA 2010 paper: Enforcing Type-Safe Linking using Inter-Package Relationships

• migrating our repository to git

More stuff

Resources

OCaml-related packages in Debian distribution are quite a lot, here you can find some resources to monitor them:

• status of the various OCaml versions in Debian
  (a per-OCaml version listing; answers questions like «is OCaml X.Y.Z available in Debian?»)

• SVN Build Statistics (powered by svnbuildstat)

• source package list ; formats: `.html`, `.txt`

• build dependency graph ; formats: `.dot`, `.ps`, `.png`

  • build order (.txt only)

• transitions

  • OCaml transition monitor

• OCaml packages on Ubuntu

  • Comparison between Debian and Ubuntu regarding status of the OCaml packages

    • Colourised comparison of source package versions between Unstable and Karmic

  • Transition of OCaml packages to latest OCaml compiler

  • Status page of new packages in Ubuntu Karmic (to monitor transition from Debian to Ubuntu)

Policy

We wrote a policy establishing best practices for packaging OCaml-related software in Debian. It is available both in HTML and plain text formats. It can also be found in the `ocaml-base-nox` package on your filesystem.

• Debian OCaml Packaging Policy ; formats: `.html`, `.txt`

Version Control System

The best way to get in touch with our work is to have a look at our SubVersioN repository. The repository is organized as follows:

• packages: debian patches and tarballs for collaboratively maintained packages

• projects: development projects related to OCaml hosted by the Task Force

• tags: subversion tags

• tools: packaging related tools we developed in order to ease our work