... and other Debian OCaml bits

As anticipated by Aba, today the OCaml 3.11.1 transition to testing has finished. Beside turning the latest stable OCaml version into a release-ready product, this transition has also switched the standard library path to /usr/lib/ocaml (it used to be /usr/lib/ocaml/X.Y.Z). The change is justified by the observation that, in fact, we have never supported (and never will) more than one OCaml ABI at the same time in a given Debian release.

Some more OCaml bit(s):

  • during DebCamp, the OCaml team has worked on revising OCaml dependency schema, on the basis of a proposal I advanced a while ago. Once implemented, the proposal in essence will mean:

    1. linkability ensured by regular Debian dependencies (no longer "inconsistent assumptions ..." errors, as long as your package manager is happy)

    2. automatic computation of dependencies between OCaml-related packages (i.e., ${ocaml:Depends} substvar)

    Beside (maybe) some tiny teeny supervision bits, all the kudos for that goes to Sylvain Le Gall, Mehdi Dogguy, and Stephane Glondu; the 3 of them have worked tirelessly during all DebConf on the design bits that were needing changes as well as on the implementation / revamp of involved tools (e.g. dh_ocaml, which I drafted (too) many years ago for not being in production yet).
    I guess you'll soon hear from them for more details.

As observed by Stephane, the transition to the new schema and tools do not need to be "all or nothing".
Hence, the current plan is to release in Squeeze most of the packages migrated to the new infrastructure, while not necessarily all of them.