OCaml branches information [closed]

Question

There's a lot of interesting branches of OCaml in http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/ocaml/branches/. I can't seem to find any good information about what these do, though. Are they not ment to be public? For example, the README-files are identical in all branches. How to find more information about them (just googling won't help)?

Answer 1

Here is some information about some of the more major branches (those which are available to be installed through OPAM -- http://opam.ocamlpro.com):

4.00.1+short-types  C 4.00.1+short-types         Better heuristic to display long type names
--                 -- 3.11.2                     Official 3.11.2 release
--                 -- 3.12.1                     Official 3.12.1 release
--                 -- 4.00.0                     Official 4.00.0 release
--                 -- 4.00.1                     Official 4.00.1 release
--                 -- 3.12.1+mirage-unix-direct  Mirage compiler for unix
--                 -- 3.12.1+mirage-xen          Mirage compiler for xen
--                 -- 3.12.1+natdynlink-osx      Support for native dynlink on OSX
--                 -- 4.00.0+debug-runtime       Debug runtime
--                 -- 4.00.0+fp                  Runtime with frame-pointers (improved GDB & perf usage)
--                 -- 4.00.0+raspberrypi         Native backend for Raspberry-PI
--                 -- 4.00.1+BER                 BER MetaOCaml (http://okmij.org/ftp/ML/MetaOCaml.html)
--                 -- 4.00.1+alloc-profiling     support allocation profiling on x86_64
--                 -- 4.00.1+annot               Enable -binannot by default
--                 -- 4.00.1+french              French translation of error messages
--                 -- 4.00.1+mirage-unix         Mirage compiler for unix
--                 -- 4.00.1+mirage-xen          Mirage compiler for xen
--                 -- 4.00.1+open-types          add open extensible types to OCaml
--                 -- 4.00.1+raspberrypi         Native backend for Raspberry-PI
--                 -- 4.01.0dev+endian           Improved low-level integer primitive access
--                 -- 4.01.0dev+mirage-unix      UNIX tuntap backend for Mirage
--                 -- 4.01.0dev+mirage-xen       Xen unikernel builds for Mirage
--                 -- 4.01.0dev+short-paths      latest trunk snapshot with short type names
--                 -- 4.01.0dev+trunk            latest trunk snapshot

Answer 2

You can try emailing OCaml maintainers at: [email protected], or post your question regarding the branches in OCaml forums. The revision logs for each of the branches may also give some clues as to what each branch is for.