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OCaml Infrastructure: Enhancing Platform Support and User Experience

Tarides' OCaml Infrastructure team has been hard at work over the last few months, focusing on improving the stability, reliability, and user experience of the OCaml ecosystem's core infrastructure. We are preparing for more substantive changes to come. We will have more fruit from this work to share soon, but updates on our efforts are overdue and we wanted to get you all caught up.

Platform Support

We've expanded and updated our platform support to keep pace with the evolving OCaml ecosystem:

  • As part of the compiler release readiness, we've added support for OCaml 5.2 and the upcoming 5.3, currently in alpha.
  • We're now publishing Windows Server 2022 Docker images to the OCaml Dockerhub. See for instance windows-server-msvc-ltsc2022-ocaml-4.14
  • Dropped support for the post-LTS distro versions Debian 10 and 11, focusing our resources on the OCaml compiler's Tier 1 platform.

These updates ensure that our systems continue to support OCaml developers on a broad range of systems, in particular by testing package publication to the opam repository and publishing Docker images.

Opam Repository Publishing Experience

We've made improvements to enhance the experience of publishing packages to the opam repository:

  • Implemented a linting check for package maintainer email addresses, ensuring package maintainers can be reliably contacted when needed.
  • Mitigated solver timeout errors in the opam repo CI system, reducing frustrating delays in the package publishing process.
  • Fixed an uncaught exception that sometimes occurred during linting checks in the opam repo CI.
  • Improved error reporting and added instructions for running lint checks locally, making it easier for package authors to identify and resolve issues before submitting to the repository.
  • We are generating documentation of the platforms under test in opam CI, allowing package authors a clear overview of the extensive build matrix we are providing.

We hope these changes will make package publication experience smoother. We're committed to improving the experience for newcomers and existing repository contributors alike, stay tuned for more improvements!

Security and Reliability

Maintaining the security and reliability of the OCaml infrastructure remains a top priority:

  • Updated our systems to address CVE-2024-6387.
  • We maintained 99.9% availability for the opam repo CI over the last two months, providing a stable and reliable service for the OCaml community.

Forging Ahead

Much has been done but much more is in the works! Expect updates more regularly going forward, and don't hesitate to reach out on ocaml/infrastructure/issues or discuss.ocaml.org if you have questions, requests, or ideas!

See full changelog
  • Added continuous deployment for service configuration (by @mtelvers, https://github.com/ocurrent/ocurrent-configurator)
  • Implemented linting for package maintainer email addresses (by @punchagan, https://github.com/ocurrent/opam-ci-check/pull/30)
  • Mitigated solver timeout errors in opam repo CI (by @mtelvers and @shonfeder, https://github.com/ocaml/infrastructure/issues/147)
  • Fixed uncaught exception in opam repo CI linting checks (by @shonfeder, https://github.com/ocurrent/opam-repo-ci/pull/341)
  • Updated systems to address CVE-2024-6387 (by @mtelvers, https://github.com/ocaml/infrastructure/issues/140)
  • Added support for OCaml 5.2 and 5.3 (by @mtelvers, https://github.com/ocurrent/opam-repo-ci/issues/268 and https://github.com/ocurrent/opam-repo-ci/issues/363)
  • Improved Windows support (by @mtelvers, https://github.com/ocurrent/docker-base-images/issues/241)
  • Added support for GCC 14 (by @mtelvers, https://github.com/ocurrent/docker-base-images/issues/279)
  • Dropped support for Debian 10 and 11 (by @mtelvers and @shonfeder, https://github.com/ocurrent/ocaml-dockerfile/pull/220 and https://github.com/ocurrent/ocaml-dockerfile/pull/210)
  • Generated documentation of CI test platforms and deployed services (by @benmandrew, https://github.com/ocurrent/opam-repo-ci/blob/master/doc/platforms.md and https://github.com/ocurrent/ocurrent-deployer/blob/master/doc/services.md)
  • Improved error reporting and local lint check instructions in opam CI (by @punchagan, https://github.com/ocurrent/opam-repo-ci/issues/359 and https://github.com/ocurrent/opam-repo-ci/issues/360)