2017-10-16 3:57 GMT-05:00 Stéphane Glondu <
glondu@debian.org>:
> On 15/10/2017 22:08, Holger Levsen wrote:
>>
>> Package: mingw-ocaml
>> Version: 4.01.0~20140328-1
>> Severity: normal
>> user:
qa.debian.org@packages.debian.org>> usertags: transitional
>>
>> Please drop the transitional package mingw-ocaml for buster,
>> as it has been released with jessie and stretch already.
>>
>> Thanks for maintaining mingw-ocaml!
>
>
> I am wondering: do we still want to maintain this? This is a very old
> version of OCaml... Romain, what are your feelings/plans about this package?
>
> If nobody steps in to update it in, let's say, 1 month, I'll ask for its
> removal (unless told otherwise).
Functionality-wise, this cross-compiler has been of tremendous help. We used to build and ship liquidsoap on windows solely thanks to it. I don't even thing a native compilation would be possible.
Now, the truth is, it's a pretty high stack of patches and porting them to new versions of OCaml is a real burden. This work should ideally be merged into the compiler's codebase. I've tried to help in this regard but haven't passed the reviewing step. There's some work being done, though, on enabling cross-compiling in OCaml, and just not for windows but I'm not sure what/when.
Regarding the package, though, I'd say if it compiles and is not a security threat why not just keep it? At least until 4.01 becomes so old that it cannot reasonably compile modern OCaml code. With the addition of safe strings by default in 4.06, this might be the case in a little while (4.01 doesn't support the "bytes" type) but I don't think that we're there just yet..
Hope this helps,
Romain