policy question with respect to data races in opam packages and OCaml 5 upper bounds about opam-repository HOT 2 OPEN

OCaml 5 was designed specifically to allow for running OCaml 4 and below code on the OCaml 5 compiler with minimal modifications and no change in behaviour, thus allowing for the migration to multiple cores as a separate step.

Therefore, it would be a real barrier to migration if parallel-unsafe code were disallowed via an upper bound to OCaml 5 in opam packages! The vast majority of code I run on OCaml 5 is still single-core, and that's completely ok.

There have been other approaches to documented the parallel safety of dependencies:

• documentation (e.g. ocaml/ocaml#11237)
• annotations for unsynchronized access (e.g. https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/11193/files)
• whole-program race detectors like TSAN (e.g. https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ann-tsan-support-in-ocaml-5-1-and-blog-post/13306)

from opam-repository.

Thanks @avsm for your opinion. I'm myself not using OCaml 5 anywhere, and just want to gather some feedback / opinions about what a potential OCaml 5 user could expect of the opam-repository packages. I understand your perspective, while it may be frustrating for new users that find every 2 seconds a data race - but c'est la vie.

from opam-repository.