Hi everyone,
I have collected a list of 50 or so packages on opam-repository whose
build is currently broken on 4.07.1. I would like to crowd-source
fixes for these packages, so that either their build is fixed or they
are marked as unbuildable. I’m posting the list in a second post
below. Please consider contributing by taking one of the packages in
the list with a TODO marker and trying to fix the issue.
Workflow
The post below is a wiki. You can edit it to mark that you are working
on one of the issues.
TODO => WIP(@user) => DONE(@user, link to change/report)
Some issues don’t have a TODO marker, because it’s unclear what to
do. Feel free to add one if you have a suggestion for what to do.
How?
I have marked some hypotheses of mine on what the issue probably is,
and how it could be fixed. Some common issues:
-
The package is missing an upper bound on one of its dependencies;
this shows up as build failures asking for library functions that
don’t exist anymore. You have to inspect the dependencies of older
and newer versions of the package, possibly the changelog of the
dependency, to guess what the upper bound should be; then test it. -
The package is broken due to an incompatibility between ‘bytes’ and
‘string’, often in an _oasis file; you can just add a dependency on
the virtual package ‘base-unsafe-string’, which will mark it
uninstallable on safe-string versions of OCaml. -
The archive where the package can be found has changed; opam files
for newer versions will lead you to the new URLs – if the new place
doesn’t have archives for older versions, you could ask the
maintainer and/or remove the package. -
The checksum for an archive has changed. Inspecting the new archive
to ensure that it is correct helps.
Why?
The failing packages are often older versions of existing, non-failing
packages. While many of us may not care about the buildability of
older versions, it does matter for the good health of the repository:
-
Some users have pinned older versions for stability reasons. If they
want to, for example, upgrade the OCaml version but preserve the
version of their dependencies, this should still work – or be
clearly marked as uninstallable, not a confusing error in the middle
of the build. -
Old packages show up in the “revdeps” of new opam-repository
submissions – when we upload a new version of a package, its
dependencies are automatically tested. Each build failure in the
revdeps requires human investigation, to understand if the issue is
due to the new package or is irrelevant. Irrelevant failures consume
time and should be reduced as much as possible. -
In the future we want to keep getting more aggressive on CI testing,
for example test OCaml packages against the development version of
OCaml on a regular basis. Again, broken builds slow us down and make
it harder to spot the true issues.
Also
If you have encountered other packages that fail to build on the opam
CI, feel free to make a post of your own to list them, with build
logs, and encourage us all to contribute in fixing the issue.