Upgrade OCaml to 5.x and add community/ocaml4
Chatting with @Celeste the other day about the future of OCaml, I open this issue to plan what, how and when.
I've kept community/ocaml
at 4.x since 5.x only have native compiler for a limited set of architectures. It is still possible to use the bytecode compiler for the other architectures but the programs will be less performant for those architectures than built with the native compiler. More architectures will be added to future OCaml 5.x releases but 32bit architectures are unlikely and those are generally more resource constrained, why I am hesitant to drop OCaml 4.x and accept using the 5.x bytecode compiler.
My suggestion is to, at some point, upgrade community/ocaml
to latest version 5, add community/ocaml
at latest version 4 and have a case statement for OCaml aports like:
case "$CARCH" in
arm*|x86) makedepends="$makedepends ocaml4" ;;
*) makedepends="$makedepends ocaml" ;;
esac
The only issue I currently see here is that 32bit/OCaml4 packages will be rebuilt when there's a new OCaml5 release and vice versa for 64bit packages, not sure if that's much of an issue if we use a generic commit message like community/*: rebuild against ocaml
.
So if, then when to do this?
- Now? There's still a few months until our 3.19 release to try it out in edge.
- When more/all of our 64bit architectures are added to a OCaml 5.x release?
- Right after our 3.19 release? So we'll have ~half a year to try it in edge before our next release.
- Other?