GODI upgrades to Ocaml-3.12.1

GODI also gets a newly designed web site: http://godi.camlcity.org is now much more illustrative and informative. As a special bonus, a news feed is included with the newest package releases (right now only as HTML, RSS will follow later). Also the list of packages has been reworked and is now fully dynamic (instead of generated).

The new bootstrap for GODI is now available as godi-rocketboost-20110717.tar.gz. It also got a bit of developers' attention, and is now more intuitive. (For example, the stage 2 of the bootstrap is now automatically started. The bootstrap is now interactive by default.) If you do not want to run another bootstrap, you can also upgrade your existing GODI installation:

• If you already have a 3.12 installation, just follow the normal upgrade path for packages in godi_console. Ocaml 3.12.1 is a normal package upgrade here.
• If you still use a 3.11 installation, just edit godi.conf, and replace the line setting GODI_SECTION, and set this variable to 3.12. Then perform a package upgrade using godi_console (as above).

There are a few remaining issues with the new version:

• Batteries: It is reported that there is an incompatibility with the new Hashtbl signature. It is being worked on this. Currently the package is broken. It is recommended that users wait until the problems have been resolved.
• Ocamlduce is still unavailable for 3.12.1. This also affects dependencies like godi-tyxml.
• After installing GODI on a newly set up system, I found problems for godi-mlgmp, godi-fftw, and godi-lablgtk(1), because they are out of sync with current C libraries, or the C libraries have become unavailable (like gtk1).
• There are a few applications which are still broken: apps-felix, apps-nurpawiki, apps-pkglab, apps-regstab. The package maintainers are notified.

The documentation archive docs.camlcity.org is still switching to 3.12 as default source for documentation. This means not all package docs are available yet (but an impressive subset is already). I hope this will be fixed until tomorrow.

A final word about GODI and OASIS. Sylvain is very interested in providing the OASIS packages in a format that GODI understands. There is now the plan that GODI extracts the required information from its package db, and OASIS uses this to wrap its packages so these can be included as package source into godi_console. We are now working on this.