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For some time, we have had issues on Ubuntu Noble when extracting tar files within Docker containers. See ocaml/infrastructure#121. This is only an issue on exotic architectures like RISCV and PPC64LE.

Previously, I discussed the installation order for a simple directed acyclic graph without any cycles. However, opam packages include post dependencies. Rather than package A depending upon B where B would be installed first, post dependencies require X to be installed after Y. The post dependencies only occur in a small number of core OCaml packages. They are quite often empty and exist to direct the solver. Up until now, I had been using a base layer with an opam switch containing the base compiler and, therefore, did not need to deal with any post dependencies.

If someone had told me a few months ago I’d be playing with .NET again after a 15+ years hiatus I probably would have laughed at this.1 Early on in my career I played with .NET and Java, and even though .NET had done some things better than Java (as it had the opportunity to learn from some early Java mistakes), I quickly settled on Java as it was a truly portable environment. I had some C# courses in the university and I wrote my bachelor’s thesis in C#. It was a rewrite of Arch Linux’s pacman, running on Mono. This was way back in 2007. ↩

Several of my colleagues and I went to FOSDEM 2025 and met many functional programming enthusiasts, sparking great conversations for next year's FOSDEM.

OCaml Core Dev meeting at Inria yesterday. These are roughly biannual synchronous catchups which provide a chance to find out what others are up to, get feedback on any major ongoing work, and attempt to unblock some stalled PRs. Sometimes tempers get frayed, but not this time round…