Thomas Gazagnaire just announced the availability of the OPAM beta release. This has been a huge amount of work for him and Louis, so I’m excited to see this release! Aside from general stability, the main highlights for me are:
A switch to the
CC0
public-domain-like license for the repository, and LGPL2+linking
exception for OPAM itself. The cutover to the new
license was
the first non-gratuitous use of GitHub’s fancy issue lists I’ve
seen, too! As part of this, we’re also beginning a transition over
to hosting it at opam.ocaml.org
, to underline our committment to
maintaining it as an OCaml community resource.
Much-improved support for package pinning and updates. This is the feature that makes OPAM work well with MirageOS, since we often need to do development work on a low-level library (such as a device driver and recompile all the reverse dependencies.
Support for post-installation messages (e.g. to display licensing information or configuration hints) and better support for the external library management issues I explained in an earlier post about OCamlot testing.
Better library structuring to let tools like Opam2web work with the package metadata. For instance, my group’s OCaml Labs has a comprehensive list of the software packages that we work on generated directly from an OPAM remote.
A growing set of administration tools (via the opam-admin
binary)
that run health checks and compute statistics over package
repositories. For example, here’s the result of running
opam-admin stats
over the latest package repository to show
various growth curves.