Re: [MirageOS-devel] MirageOS fortnightly call - Wednesday 1st at 4pm BST

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 6 Jul 2015, at 20:26, Richard Mortier <richard.mortier@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> *ThomasG:* Mirage is a set of libraries that work together and a frontend 
>> tool that glues
>> them together.  Its fine to release libraries as a batch since we have OPAM, 
>> but what we
>> didnt manage well is evolving the API of the Mirage DSL itself which glues 
>> it all together
>> (Anil: this is referring to the `config.ml` API).
>> *Mort:* the Mirage DSL eis an implicit collation of a bunch of library 
>> versions and it is
>> hard to track since its not captured in OPAM.
>> *ThomasG:* we can fix this by adding conflicts in the OPAM metadata.
> 
> DIdn't we agree that adding piles of upper-bound constraints wasn't
> desirable though?

Piles of upper bounds constraints are fine when a new version of a
package is released, since it's then a valid upper bound.  The issue
was to do with having upper bounds by default, which make it very
hard to pin development versions of packages.  Default upper bounds
are also pessimal: right now, the common case is that a new package
release doesn't break the interface (and we add an upper bound when it
does break).

> 
> Specifically -- I was proposing that CI testing should be CI testing
> (not simply "does it still build" testing), by building some of the
> depends-on packages against the newly built library in question.
> DavidS noted that REVDEPS (IIRC) is already a supported variable for
> the ocaml-travisci-skeleton scripts and needn't be set to "*" as it
> often currently is, but could be set to a few chosen reverse
> dependencies to at least try and avoid (or detect anyway) major
> downstream breakage.
> 
> Ie., I think that with a few minor additions to relevant .travis.yml
> files, this bit of the situation can probably be improved immediately.
> (I have the impression that many Mirage libraries already use the
> skeleton scripts.)

What specific additions do you have in mind?  Please do file issues
on the ocaml-travis-ci-skeleton repo with any ideas.

More importantly, it's worth sweeping through older libraries that
haven't been updated in a while and making sure they all use the
skeleton scripts.  I've done this for around 20 or so libraries
in recent months, so it's generally better.

-anil
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