Re: RFS: janest/111.21.00-1.1 [NMU] -- Jane Street Library Collection

[Hilko Bengen <bengen@debian.org>]

* Matthew Maurer:

> I've forked your repository for the Jane Street collection of
> libraries to: http://github.com/maurer/janest and fixed the FTBFS,
> exported more of the libraries in the source package, as well as made
> some minor description/install file changes to get it to be lintian
> clean (with the exception of some hardening issues that can't be fixed
> for ocaml packages).

Even though I am not a member of debian-ocaml-maint (or even consider
myself an OCaml programmer), I would like to help you very much in your
effort. However, after having looked at your git repository, I am left
with a few questions.

Hwo come that everything released by Jane Street is now bundled into one
big source package?

This seems to be a decision made by Lifeng Sun when "importing" upstream
version 111.21.00. Where was it imported from? -- I haven't seen any
upstream tarball that contains that one great bundle.

Does this even make sense? Looking at the tarballs available for
download at <https://ocaml.janestreet.com/ocaml-core/>, it seems that
not every sub-package is released at every version number bump:

    111.17.00 contains: async, async_extended, async_extra,
        async_inotify, async_kernel, async_parallel, async_unix, bignum,
        core, core_extended, core_kernel, faillib, jenga, ocaml_plugin,
        patdiff, patience_diff, sexplib, typerep

    111.21.00 contains: async_extended, async_extra, async_ssl,
        async_unix, core, core_kernel, custom_printf, jenga,
        ocaml_plugin, patdiff, patience_diff.

    111.25.00 contains: async, async_extra, async_kernel,
        async_parallel, async_unix, core, core_extended, core_kernel,
        custom_printf, jenga, ocaml_plugin, patdiff, patience_diff,
        sexplib, textutils

    111.28.00 contains: async_extended, async_extra, async_find,
        async_inotify, async_kernel, async_parallel, async_unix, bignum,
        core, core_extended, core_kernel, jenga, ocaml_plugin, pa_bench,
        pa_ounit, patdiff, patience_diff, textutils

For example, the libasync-ocaml-dev that would be built out of
janest_111.21.00-1.1 is probably from the 111.17.00 release -- but we
can't be sure without comparing the source code... This looks bad.

What will happen to the existing packages (sexplib310, bin-prot,
fieldslib, type-conv)?

Cheers,
-Hilko