Preparing for ocaml 4.11

This message is mostly for Richard Jones, but I'm sending it to the list so that others who maintain OCaml packages can weigh in if they choose. I have BCCed a few of you that are affected by some suggestions I make below. I have spent the last several days doing mock builds to see if I can safely update all the OCaml packages I maintain to their latest versions, since some have new versions that are specifically for OCaml 4.11 compatibility. The following remarks, in no particular order, stem from that effort. First the good news: I was able to build all the updated versions successfully, although see below. Some of the recently-added packages have boolean dependencies, which I added at the reviewer's request in order to mimic the version requirements in the opam files. The ocaml-ppx-custom-printf spec file, for example, has this: BuildRequires: (ocaml-base-devel >= 0.13 and ocaml-base-devel < 0.14) It never occurred to me until now to ask if your (Richard's) ocaml rebuild script can handle such dependencies. Can it? (And I lost the link to the script. Can you supply it again?) The utop package has a new version, 2.6.0, that brings OCaml 4.11 compatibility. However, it requires version 3.1.x of ocaml-lambda-term, which has a new dependency, mew_vi, that we do not have in Fedora. The mew_vi module requires mew, which requires trie. I have submitted review requests and am waiting for somebody to respond to yesterday's request for review swaps: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1850263 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1850264 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1850265 I successfully updated all of the Jane Street packages that are currently on version 0.13.x to version 0.14.0. However, one of them is going to be somewhat problematic. The ocaml-ppx-inline-test package has a new dependency, time_now. The time_now module has 11 dependencies that we do not already have in Fedora. All 11, and time_now itself, were on my roadmap for eventual inclusion in Fedora, but I had not intended to pursue them just yet. I haven't put any of the 11 up for review yet, although I have written spec files and done local mock builds for them all. I need to go over them once more and then I'll put them up for review. If the timeframe to an ocaml 4.11 build is too short to wait for that, we may have to disable tests for packages that currently consume ocaml-ppx-inline-test, and leave it in a broken state until those reviews can be completed. I would like to see some updates to other people's packages. For all of the following, I have the necessary spec file changes ready to show to the maintainers should they like to see them. Updating ocaml-bisect-ppx to its latest version requires updating ocaml-ppx-tools-versioned to version 5.4.0 or later. I suggest that we update to ocaml-ocplib-endian from version 1.0 to 1.1. It includes fixes for a couple of issues (https://github.com/OCamlPro/ocplib-endian/issues/20 and https://github.com/OCamlPro/ocplib-endian/issues/21) that I think we would like to have resolved. This entails a change to building with dune. Unfortunately, a new issue makes some tests fail (https://github.com/OCamlPro/ocplib-endian/issues/18), but I hope to find a workaround for that soon. I suggest an update to ocaml-result from version 1.2 to 1.5. This version makes Result an alias of Stdlib.Result on recent OCaml versions. Again, this entails a change to building with dune. We could also update ocaml-seq to 0.2.2 just to drop the downstream patches (this is yet another conversion to building with dune, by the way), but I don't know that there is any other advantage to updating. We could update ocaml-react to version 1.2.1 to drop the downstream patch. This entails a license change. A rebuild seems like a good opportunity to update ocaml-lwt to version 5.3.0. With this version, a number of spec file simplifications are possible. I've got changes ready to update ocaml-sedlex to version 2.2 AND add a %check script. I've been wondering about uchar and stdlib-shims. We don't need them in Fedora, but then we don't really need ocaml-result or ocaml-seq either. Should we add uchar and stdlib-shims, just so we can stop modifying upstream dune and opam files? That might also benefit Fedora users who try to build using Fedora's ocaml ecosystem. Maybe I should do COPR builds of all this so everybody can easily see what I'm talking about? I did a total of 63 package builds in mock, many of them simple rebuilds, so it will take a little time to get that going. Do we know yet what the timeframe is for an ocaml 4.11 release? -- Jerry James http://www.jamezone.org/