Re: About this ocaml versioning stuff

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 08:47:18PM +0200, Denis Barbier wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 09:58:07AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> [...]
> > But again, it was kind of an experiment, i want feedback, and maybe we
> > should also get upstream opinion or the opinion of the community at
> > large.
> 
> Sven, you should explain exactly which problems you want to solve with
> this versioning scheme.  Otherwise I am afraid that such a discussion
> will go nowhere.

Ok.

  1) The problem of bytecode programs and backward compatibility
     thereof. each bytecode program depends on the exact same version of
     ocamlrun it was compiled for. If ocaml gets upgraded to a new
     version, the bytecode programs will break, you have to recompile
     them which may or may not be possible. Some of these you can and
     should update, but some you may not have the source for.

  2) The problem of having multiple ocaml implementation installed side
     by side, to compile and use programs with various versions of ocaml
     at the same time. Nice for developer wanting to release programs
     that can compile on various versions of the compiler suite.

  3) The testing migration stuff. This is a good reason, to have 3.07
     enter testing quickly, but may not be really important, as we have
     showed that we can handle quick migrations.

Again, all these which is discussed can be applied to two things :

  a) the compiler suite : i already did the job, we can use it.

  b) the libraries, which is more complicated.

Friendly,

Sven Luther