Re: pkgsrc net/mldonkey (is broken)

[Jaap Boender <jaapb%kerguelen.org@localhost>]

On 14/11/2019 01:01, Greg Troxel wrote:
o I would say: if you download the upstream release corresponding to
> what's packaged, and build it from source, following its instructions,
> does it build and work?   If not, upstream is broken, and you should
> address the problems there.

Speaking as the OCaml guy (sort of) for pkgsrc, it looks like the latest 
stable release of mldonkey is five years old; that's a long time in the 
OCaml world. Along with Unison, mldonkey is one of the OCaml programs I 
don't use personally, so updates may not be as frequent as for, say, Coq.

> Looking at the PR, this seems to be about ocaml.  ocaml seems to be a
> language family with effectively frequent changes in language
> specification.  This in my view imposes a duty on programs that are
> written in ocaml to have new releases that are buildable with upcoming
> compiler versions, while still building with the old ones, and to have
> these new versions be sufficiently compatible that the updates are
> trivial.   In practice, this doesn't happen :-(
>
>
> Now, one could argue that pkgsrc  should have N versions of ocaml at
> once, and be able to build everything with different ones, like python.
> That's a vast amount of work, and if you want to start trying to support
> that in pkgsrc-wip, we hand out commit privileges there pretty easily.
> But really you are running into a problem in ocaml culture.

Well put :) Some projects are really good about this, others, not so 
much. Over the last few years, quite a few improvements have been made 
in inserting layers between the compiler and the code so that there is a 
cushion for all-too-frequent changes in the internals. But breakage 
still occurs; the change from 4.07 to 4.08 was particularly painful, 
4.09 (which is available in wip already) seems reasonably smooth so far 
(still working things out on that one).

best

  Jaap