It is my pleasure to announce the launch of the OCaml language committee. This committee is intended as collegial instance with the aim to facilitate discussions and consensus making about the evolution of the OCaml language and its standard library.
Over the years, it has become a common shared grievance among both maintainers and contributors to the OCaml language that, sometimes, the review process for changes grinds to a halt, either because consensus is elusive or because no one feels empowered enough to take a decision single-handed.
In order to reduce the number of those instances of decision paralysis, the OCaml maintainers have decided to experiment with an OCaml language committee: a subgroup of the OCaml
community organised to discuss evolution of the OCaml language in a timely fashion.
In practice, if someone feels that a contribution (a Pull Request, issue, Request For Comment) might be stuck or might benefit from a wider discussion, they may ask the committee to take the contribution under consideration by mentioning it to the committee chair (which is currently me, aka @Octachron on github).
Then the committee will deliberate on this contribution both on the archived public mailing list ocaml-language-committee@inria.fr for internal committee discussion [1] and possibly on the relevant community channels (ocaml/ocaml or here on discuss). At the end of this collegial discussion, the committee will publish a consultative decision on the matter. We expect that having such a collegial consultative decision would be enough to unblock most situations.
For more details, the intended working of the committee is described at RFCs/Committee.md at master · ocaml/RFCs · GitHub .
Happy hacking,
Florian Angeletti for the OCaml Language Committee
Anyone is welcome to subscribe to the mailing list to attend to the discussions, but please do not flood the mailing list so that we can keep it fully open. ↩︎