Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] Version 1.0?

[John M. S. <sk...@oz...>]

Brian Hurt wrote:

> Here's an interesting debate point- what does a 1.0 release of ExtLib look 
> like?  How close are we?
> 
> Starting this discussion is tantaumont to saying "I think it's ready now", 
> which I'm not.  I'm just thinking of maybe getting a rough sketch of what 
> people want/are working on.
> 
> Here's my short list in approximate order of priority:
> - fix the bug in psqueue
> - unit tests at least some
> - generic red-black tree library
> - doubly linked list library
> - bit fields/bit sets
> 
> Comments?

It is necessary to provide on-site documentation
to what is *officially* working properly, and to
include that in any release.

If you do that, it doesn't matter if the other
half of the library isn't ready. Release it anyhow.

	release early, release often

is often quoted (though I don't know who said it).

What would be important to me, if I found I wanted
to use some functions from it, is that it can be
EASILY USED BY DUMB PROGRAMMERS WHO NEVER WRITE OCAML.

By which I mean, it should be trivial for them to
download the library, build it, do some rudimentary
testing, install it .. and then it is available
for building the *actual* ocaml product they really
want.

On a Unix system an important requirement is to have
a standard default place for it to live, so I can
write scripts to build my ocaml software which happens
to use ExtLib *as if* it were part of the standard
distribution (after its been installed).

I do hate the idea of polluting the offical
distribution directories with third party software,
since it is sometimes nice to rm -rf the whole official
distribution installation and rebuild it (and if
ExtLib lived inside, it too would have to be rebuilt).
OTOH, even Python provides a 'site-packages' directory ..
.. which is a subdirectory of the main library directory :(


-- 
John Max Skaller, mailto:sk...@oz...
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