I would really like to upgrade OCaml in EPEL 5 to version 3.10.2.
The main reason is that much of the other software we'd like to ship with EPEL needs the new camlp4 [1], which was introduced with OCaml >= 3.10.0. (EPEL ships with OCaml 3.09.3 at present).
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/repoview/ocaml.html
Backporting the software to the older OCaml is going to be very complicated. The two versions of camlp4 (< 3.10.0 and >= 3.10.0) are really incompatible. The newer one is much more featureful and is rapidly displacing older versions. Backporting just the newer camlp4 to the older compiler is also considered intractable, since the compiler and camlp4 are closely linked.
Now the downside to doing this is that it would require any OCaml users of EPEL 5 to recompile their software. This may just be a simple recompile, but there are also worst-case scenarios such as people using and relying on the old camlp4 who may have to make modifications of their software. So it's quite a big disruption for everyone. I'm also very aware that EPEL is supposed to be long-term stable.
Comments?
Rich.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camlp4 http://brion.inria.fr/gallium/index.php/Camlp4