Https://ocaml.org/p/ocaml/latest/versions seems to have wrong/misleading release dates

[haochenx]

(sorry if already reported / tracked somewhere)

I just searched for “OCaml version release date” on Google, which (correctly I guess? see edit) takes me to https://ocaml.org/p/ocaml/latest/versions but to my surprise the web page claims(?) OCaml 5.6.0 is already released on 26 Jan 2026, which is clearly not the case.

Also it claims OCaml 5.4.0 is released on 26 Aug 2024, which is also not true. Maybe it’s because the Release Date column uses data extracted from OPAM? But nevertheless it is quite misleading (Google’s AI Overview is an obvious victim..) and IMO worthy some attention and a potential fix.

Edit:

So clearly https://ocaml.org/releases should be consulted when one wants to know the release date for various versions of OCaml. Yet I’d say the (existence with the) current contents of https://ocaml.org/p/ocaml/latest/versions is very misleading to someone who’s not familiar with the fact. Maybe there should be some explanations on what info https://ocaml.org/p/ocaml/latest/versions actually contains.

[reynir]

The repository is here: GitHub - ocaml/ocaml.org: The official OCaml website.

Indeed, it looks like they scrape the git log to find when the package first appeared in opam-repository: ocaml.org/src/ocamlorg_package/lib/opam_repository.ml at ff95fb40173bdb03e0ea23fbbc332512fd10030a · ocaml/ocaml.org · GitHub

[haochenx]

ah that makes a lot of sense on how we have the current situation.

maybe the ocaml packages should have some flags so the scraper can know that the package is not officially released yet. it seems the only flags the scraper can potentially rely on now is avoid-version, which doesn’t sound like a good indicator for distinguishing release readiness.

[reynir]

Yea, I think it would be nice if ocaml.org was a bit more honest about what “release date” means.

[octachron]

This is the “honest” release date of the ocaml opam metapackage. The 5.6.0 metapackage is already released since this the current development version of the compiler. The correct link for OCaml releases is either OCaml Releases or OCaml Changelog .

[haochenx]

Funny that ChatGPT made the same mistake as my first try, but Claude is able to get it correct

In the meanwhile Gemini is.. very disappointingly getting it very wrong…

[haochenx]

for the record this issue has been addressed by Clarify opam package version status and dates by smorimoto · Pull Request #3713 · ocaml/ocaml.org · GitHub
(kudos: @smorimoto and @jonludlam, thanks!) and the involved packages’ listing page now has a clear banner so it is no longer confusing.