zack's home page/ blog/ posts/ 2009/ 11/ jane street core 0.6.0 has arrived

Debian "Core" 0.6.0 packages ready

I've completed the packaging of the new release of (Jane Street) Core, version 0.6.0. Core is (yet another) extended / alternative standard library for OCaml, integrating not only the much needed "everyday functions" but also offering consistent abstractions throughout all stdlib modules (with a lot of inspiration from well-known type classes from the Haskell stdlib), consistent naming conventions (e.g. all functions using exceptions as meaningful return values ends in _exn), and significant syntax extensions.

While I've been thus far an OCaml Batteries Included fanboy, I confess that nowadays I'm more skeptical about its success than in the past, in spite of having contributed a tad of code to it. The reason is simply that the lead of the project is now gone and, more importantly, has done so without having (yet?) clearly appointed/found a new lead. That does not change the fact that David has only to be kudoed for his amount of impressive work on Batteries. Still, as a matter of fact right there is no stable release yet and there is no one that will be taking the project to deliver one, since no one else has stepped forward (yet?).

In this interim the OCaml problems in delivering, on top of an amazing core language, an amazing development platform in which programmers are not forced to reinvent wheels, stand. Core fills such a gap properly. I was preferring Batteries to it due to its more open development process, but in spite of that Core is a pretty damn good stdlib. Long life to Jane Street that currently maintains it :-)

Now, back to the main topic of this post, Debian packages for Core 0.6.0 are now available; you will be able to get it from the main/unstable archive soon (some manual NEW processing is required). In the meantime they can be fetched from my personal APT repository, as usual:

    deb http://people.debian.org/~zack/debian zack-unstable/
    deb-src http://people.debian.org/~zack/debian zack-unstable/

A few noteworthy changes from the past package releases:

  • There is now a new set of packages (libcore-extended-ocaml{,-dev}) that contains Core_extended. It is a new subset of Core, which offers more features on top of Core, but which has more dependencies (most notably Pcre-OCaml) and is declared to be less thoroughly peer-reviewed than Core itself.

  • There is now a separate documentation package (libcore-ocaml-doc) which contains the built ocamldoc HTML API reference for Core and Core_extended.

    Note that it is not exactly the same doc that has been recently announced by Jane Street and that is now available on the web. The latter is comprehensive of all other Jane Street libraries (sexplib, bin-prot, ...). I'll be probably packaging that too, but first some licensing problems need to be solved.

Update 18/10/2009: core 0.6.0 and all its components have passed through NEW, they are now available in the Debian archive as usual