opam
A little bit of History
opam
The first specification draft of OPAM was written at the end of Jan 2012 by Thomas Gazagnaire from OCamlPro. The specification was reviewed by Fabrice Le Fessant (OCamlPro/INRIA), Yaron Minsky (Jane Street) -- who funded the project, and Anil Madhavapeddy (University of Cambridge) -- who needed a source-based package manager to manage libraries emerging from the Mirage OS project.
At about the same time, Frederic Tuong, an intern from Inria, funded by the DORM research grant in collaboration with OCamlPro and IRILL, started to implement the first version of OPAM
(called ocp-get at the time) at the end of Feb 2012. He also started to create the
first OPAM packages
one month later. Frederic and Thomas worked
closely together in the following months to demonstrate OPAM at the
OCaml Workshop 2012 where (almost) everyone was already using it!
Frederic started a PhD in Oct 2012 and left the OPAM team to focus on his studies. Roberto Di
Cosmo and Pietro Abate, from IRILL, began helping Thomas at the end of 2012 to properly integrate their Mancoosi tools (such as CUDF and dose) so that OPAM could benefit from modern constraint solving tools and be able to automatically use the
aspcud external solver if is available.
At the end of 2012, Vincent Bernardoff and Guillem Rieu (from OCamlPro) worked for a few months on improving the documentation and ease of use of OPAM for newcomers. They created opam2web, the tool used to generate https://opam.ocaml.org.
The first public beta of OPAM was released in Jan 2013 and few months later (in March 2013) the first official release landed. A few days later, Louis Gesbert -- who joined OCamlPro in Dec 2012, pushed his first commit to the codebase. In Nov 2013, OPAM 1.1.0 was released and Louis became the technical lead. A months later, opam 1.1.1 with numerous bug fixes.
opam-repository
Meanwhile, in June 2012 Mirage started to use opam (as it was using a
custom 3.12.1 compiler). Very quickly, starting off Frederic's work, Anil and Thomas shared the task
of adding new packages and monitor the pull-requests on
opam-repository. The initial policy was to accept as many packages as
possible, which means that things were often broken. So they started
to use background bulks builds
to improve the overall repository
quality. In July 2012, Jane-Street's Core libraries made its
apparition
in the repository. To improve the quality of new
packages, Travis CI was integrated in Sept 2013 to the pull-request
process. From Aug to Nov 2013, all the contributors of opam-repository
were contacted to re-license their contribution to CC0, which enable the
move of the repository
to the ocaml organisation. The opam
weather service,
created by Iril and OCamlPro, was announced in
Apr 2014 and expose quality metrics to the repository quality.
Notes: Some significant bumps in opam-repository were adoption by projects: start of the bi-weekly pulls from Jane Street on Core (the biggest one), the Ocsigen and XAPI remotes, and Mirage releases.
Getting Support
Opam has been created and is maintained by OCamlPro. Bug reports and feature requests for the opam tool should be reported on opam's issue-tracker. Packaging issues or requests for a new package can be reported on the official repository's issue-tracker.
General queries for both the tool and the packages could be addressed on the OCaml-platform mailing-list and insights and evolution of opam internals can discussed on the opam-devel mailing-list.
Standard commercial terms and support on opam, as well as training and consulting services, are provided by OCamlPro.
