Re: [Caml-list] [ANN] beta-release of OPAM

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 18 Jan 2013, at 11:19, Alain Frisch <alain@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> I've sent my first "pull request" for the inclusion of a new package in OPAM 
> :-)

Yay!

> Are there plans to provide a more direct way to submit proposals for new 
> packages?  If I understand correctly, the current scheme requires to create 
> an account on github, fork the opam-repository, clone the fork locally, 
> create and commit the package locally, push it to github, and then create a 
> pull request.  Admittedly, this is not difficult once you're familiar with 
> GIT and github, but I can imagine that it will still discourage some people 
> from submitting their first package.  What about a simple web interface to 
> upload a .tar.gz of the package description, for instance?  It should not be 
> too hard to automate the treatment of uploaded package descriptions.

A certain barrier to entry in the early days isn't a bad thing. Homebrew seems 
to cope well enough with this workflow (with over 10,000 forks).   We should 
probably add a CONTRIBUTING file with clear instructions to `opam-repository`.

However, I do have ocaml-github [1] bindings now which we're using for comment 
reporting in Real World OCaml (so that comments reported via the website 
version are converted into Github issues for us to parse). It should be 
straightforward to support for this to OPAM. 

Thomas just added (in trunk) a git-like extension mechanism to OPAM which will 
be suitable for this purpose.  If you execute an unknown subcommand, say `opam 
foo bar`, it will look for the `opam-foo` binary and execute it with the sub 
arguments.

This should be sufficient to build an `opam-upload` command that has all the 
Github dependencies, without making the base OPAM package more complicated to 
build.  I'm still working on a stable release of Cohttp, which the Github 
bindings depend on, so it's important that OPAM remains easy to bootstrap 
without requiring zillions of bleeding-edge dependencies.

-anil

[1] opam install github