Move the official sources site?

Ecosystem
1

Howdy!

I’ve noticed that although we now seem to have releases put out onto github, it seems that the “official” source downloads are still from caml.inria.fr. I was wondering if it made sense for the https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/releases location to be made canonical instead, given that the caml.inria.fr site is somewhat deprecated in general?

2

TL;DR: github lacks support for xz.

This URL gives 404: 4.09.0.tar.xz

1 Like
3

Is that really sufficient reason to maintain a separate infrastructure?

2 Likes
4

If I were in charge to decide, the simple reason is “I remain the owner of my own things”. As you may know, things in The Internet disappear at random times, usually at the time when you need them most. One can only hope the current bugdatabase will last for a few decades.

2 Likes
5

Not saying it should be done (I myself do not store my release artefacts on github) and if you asked me I’d rather have everything on ocaml.org. But note that arbitrary files can be stored on github releases — and that’s the way it should be done, do not rely on github making archives for you, they have generally proven to be unstable.

1 Like
6

@perry, the opam package already uses the source from github releases. Thus, the sources from caml.inria.fr don’t strike me as more canonical than these one. If the question is more, “why are the source still distributed from caml.inria.fr?”, one reason is probably to have at least one (small) distribution channel independent from github.

2 Likes
7

Perhaps, as @dbuenzli suggests, the independent distribution location should be ocaml.org? Regardless, given that every page on caml.inria.fr tells us that it is obsolete and dead, it would be nice to put the official release sources somewhere else.

3 Likes