[Caml-list] Ocaml and lablgtk interface committed or not?

[bill yan]

Hi,

Just a general question, Are Ocaml and lablgtk interfaces committed? I
mean whether Ocaml and lablgtk interfaces(command and library) always
backward compatible? Thanks a lot.

Regards,
Bill

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[Richard Jones]

On Mon, Jul 07, 2008 at 10:41:45AM +0800, bill yan wrote:
> Just a general question, Are Ocaml and lablgtk interfaces committed? I
> mean whether Ocaml and lablgtk interfaces(command and library) always
> backward compatible? Thanks a lot.

Not precisely sure what you mean by 'committed', but the answer is no.
OCaml has no binary compatibility at all between compiler releases,
not even between point releases. Lablgtk2 is even worse - there is no
_source_ compatibility either, and in practice it often breaks
requiring bothersome conditional compilation if you want your code to
compile with multiple versions of lablgtk2.

For this reason, Fedora freezes OCaml & lablgtk versions every six
months and avoids upgrading them in old releases. We wouldn't upgrade
them unless there was some absolutely unavoidable security problem or
similar emergency.

Rich.

--
Richard Jones
Red Hat

[Sylvain Le Gall]

On 07-07-2008, Richard Jones <ri...@annexia.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 07, 2008 at 10:41:45AM +0800, bill yan wrote:
>> Just a general question, Are Ocaml and lablgtk interfaces committed? I
>> mean whether Ocaml and lablgtk interfaces(command and library) always
>> backward compatible? Thanks a lot.
>

> For this reason, Fedora freezes OCaml & lablgtk versions every six
> months and avoids upgrading them in old releases. We wouldn't upgrade
> them unless there was some absolutely unavoidable security problem or
> similar emergency.
>

This statement applies for all kind of ocaml distribution (debian, godi,
freebsd...) and for all ocaml libraries (pxp, ocaml-libivrt...)

You should understand that, apart from the fact that lablgtk is written
in OCaml, there is no link between lablgtk library and ocaml INRIA
distribution.

Lablgtk is just a library written in/for OCaml.

Regards,
Sylvain Le Gall