[Bug 218333] [exp-run] updating lang/ocaml 4.02 to 4.05.0

[bugzilla-noreply at freebsd.org]

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=218333

--- Comment #54 from hannes at mehnert.org ---
Nice to hear from you.

> I intend to review and possibly revive most (useful) of them in coming weeks/months.

Great!

> It was because of the considerable techdebt we gained in between 4.02 and4.05.  I hope the next hop won't be so costly (albeit my procrastination may very well contribute to it).

The "big jump" is to 4.06.0 and above, where the defaults of the "string" type
changed -- it is now immutable. This required some effort in the OCaml
ecosystem, but there are lots of advantages (easier intuition of code, more
compiler optimizations, ..).

> > Would you be interested in a cleanup run of the FreeBSD ports that
> > remove all the dangling libraries?
> No, please.

I looked into that again, and wondered about two things:
- are there any visualization tools for dependencies between ports?
- are there any statistics (maybe from pkg host) about popularity /
installations of a certain port?

> Language-specific package managers are cancer (NPM is particularly bad example of this) and do not align well with *nix distributions' own package managers.  It probably makes sense in Windows as it lacks any decent package management, but not in FreeBSD.

I agree with that statement, though looking from the real world I don't know of
any OCaml developer using their *nix package manager. Opam is rather friendly
with other package managers - it only installs stuff into ~/.opam (not system
wide, ...).

Given your above statement, I get that you'd appreciate the existing OCaml
ports being retained and maintained (updated)? I'd still be more enthusiastic
to find the OCaml ports that are actually useful and used, remove the others,
and then move forward upgrading the lang/ocaml to a more recent version.

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