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As we settle into 2026, I have been doing a little early spring-cleaning. A few years ago, we had a slightly chaotic time in opam-repository over what should have been a migration from gforge.inria.fr to a new GitLab instance. Unfortunately, some release archives effectively disappeared from official locations, and although the content was available elsewhere, the precise archives weren’t generally available, which is a problem for the checksums in opam files. We’ve had similar problems with GitHub in the past. As a ‘temporary solution’, @avsm created ocaml/opam-source-archives to house copies of these archives (I think it’s a somewhat prescient sha for that first commit!). As is so often the case with temporary solutions, it’s grown somewhat. Rather against my personal better judgement, the repo got used to house files which used to be shipped as part of ocaml/opam-repository. Removing the files from the repository was a good change, because they were always being shipped as part of opam update, but unfortunately moving them to an “archive” repository has made it rather too tempting to add new files, making an archive repository a primary source.

We are pleased to announce the minor release of opam 2.0.8. This new version contains some backported fixes: Critical for fish users! Don't add . to PATH. [#4078] Fix sandbox script for newer ccache versions. [#4079 and #4087] Fix sandbox crash when ~/.cache is a symlink. [#4068] User modifications ...

There are abundant resources online trying to scare programmers away from usingshell scripts. Most of them, if anything, succeed in convincing the reader tob...