Thanks Patrick for the fantastic distillation of results. It’s extremely useful to see our user responses segmented by their experience. (in particular, our self-identified expert userbase runs Coq a lot more than our self-identified newcomer codebase who tend to use JavaScript – we want to make sure we continue to help all of these segments!).
At a high level, this survey has already influenced the Platform tool developers. Documentation has been identified as a priority item for next year, and so a couple of next steps are happening this week already among the various groups:
-
The regular odoc developer meeting this week will also feature the opam team as part of our community dev meetings, and we are getting together to put the final plan together to put a docs.ocaml.org site together. The results of this will be on the dev wiki as usual, so anyone interested can track progress and suggest ideas (the video meetings are not exactly closed, but fully open participation isn’t practical given the constraints of current technology – please ping the odoc maintainer @jonludlam directly if interested in attending)
-
the second part of a docs site is to ensure we have really reliable and solid workflows for opam-repo contributions (including bulk builds, health checks and having a more automated contribution process, ideally without having to run a CLI tool). The next opam dev meeting later this week will feature us planning a switch to a cluster-based nextgen CI for opam-respository. We’ve also invited the maintainers of the Coq opam repository as well as Tezos and Jane Street (who contribute large package sets regularly) so we can ensure we work well with those ecosystems as well. Our intention here is to really reduce the burden on contributions to opam repository by mechanising as much of the grunt work as possible, thereby helping both beginners and expert users. Our new CI will also feature macOS and Windows testing as we bring those cluster workers online, and be much more easily extensible to custom workflows.
-
Having all the fancy package cluster builds in the world don’t help if noone is actually writing any documentation in their libraries. We’re hoping that new tools (such as mdx from Real World OCaml) will reduce the friction of entry to writing ocamldoc tutorials and sites. The mdx tool usage is easy but the implementation is quite complex (due to the interlock with the internal compiler-libs), so there is a mdx team working away on it, including hopefully speeding it up with native code compilation and continuing to improve the integration with dune and other build tools. @yminsky and I use mdx to write the whole of Real World OCaml (v2 of which is coming out soon in print), and we are most eager for other people to fork our tools and write their own books (like the Owl scientific computing book).
- Finally, @ashish @gemmag and I have been putting our heads together to get funding sorted to reboot the ocaml.org site and make it easier to maintain, in recognition of the fact that the “old guard” (Christophe, Ashish, Phillippe, myself) just don’t have the day-to-day time anymore to keep things up. @patricoferris, @kanishka @sanette Bella and @JohnWhitington have all been contributing content to ocaml.org, and we are doing both incremental changes and also overhauling the internals of how it is built to use the latest and greatest innovations. I’m excited to see what all these new contributors will come up with.
This is of course not a closed list of action items – simply what I am tracking as the coordinator of the OCaml Platform efforts – so please keep suggestions and analysis flowing.
Thanks to everyone for the input and comments so far. If anyone has a burning desire to be in any of the dev meetings, please get in touch with me directly (anil@recoil.org) or the maintainers of the individual tool. I’ve never seen this much activity happening in all my time working on OCaml, so it warms my heart on this crisp winters day to see all the constructive positivity and effort going on. Keep it up and keep the suggestions coming 