Add x-maintenance-intent to your opam files

[hannesm]

Dear Madam or Sir,

due to the opam repository archival process, we are keen to have the maintainers of packages specify their intention. We noticed that merlin has a lot of releases, and are curious what your maintenance intention is.

You can read up on the policy at https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/blob/master/governance/policies/archiving.md and the x-maintenance-intent field at https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/blob/master/governance/policies/archiving.md#specification-of-the-x--fields-used-in-the-archiving-process

Thanks a lot for taking this into consideration. Please note that adding x-maintenance-intent in the latest release is sufficient (please feel free to PR such a field directly to the opam-repository).

Also note that if there exists a package that is to be retained in opam-repository, and this depends on a specific merlin version (not part of the maintenance-intent), this merlin version is kept -- so we don't end up in uninstallable packages.

[voodoos]

Hello @hannesm,

We maintain the latest releases of Merlin for the two last releases of the compiler and 4.14.
For example, the currently maintained versions are v4.18-414, v5.3-502 and v5.3-503.

I think that would translate into this value:
x-maintenance-intent: ["v(latest)-414" "v(latest)-(latest)" "v(latest)-(latest-1)"]

Does that feels right to you ? (I mean, is that the expected syntax ?)

[hannesm]

Thanks @voodoos, I'll get back to you later about the syntax. Thanks for explaining what your maintenance strategy is.

[hannesm]

We maintain the latest releases of Merlin for the two last releases of the compiler and 4.14. For example, the currently maintained versions are v4.18-414, v5.3-502 and v5.3-503.

I think that would translate into this value: x-maintenance-intent: ["v(latest)-414" "v(latest)-(latest)" "v(latest)-(latest-1)"]

Does that feels right to you ? (I mean, is that the expected syntax ?)

I'm confused by the "-" (since in opam, only "." is a separator between major, minor, patch, subpatch, whatever you call it), but @raphael-proust volunteered to support that in the parser for maintenance intent. Your maintenance-intent looks allright, apart from the leading "v" -- you don't need that (at least according to https://ocaml.org/p/merlin/latest your released versions are not prefixed by "v").

Thanks a lot.

[hannesm]

My impression is, esp. with the revised specification of the semantics (https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/opam-repository-archive-clarification-of-the-opam-fields) that what you try to achieve is "the latest version for each supported OCaml compiler"!? If this is the case, the x-maintenance-intent should be ["(latest)"]. Does this sound good to you/

[voodoos]

Sounds reasonable to me, even if it does not inform about which versions of the compiler are supported.

[hannesm]

Hmm, I'm a bit puzzled. From the discuss post linked above:

[...]
The opam-repository supports (from February 1st on) OCaml 4.08 and greater.
[...]
The [...] semantics of “(latest)” is “the latest version of this package, so that every supported OCaml version will have an installation candidate”.

So, from the archival perspective, for each OCaml compiler >= 4.08, a version of merlin will be retained that is installable.

[voodoos]

Yes, from the archival perspective keeping the latest Merlin (and merlin lib and dot-merlin-reader and ocaml-lsp-server) for each opam supported compiler is the right thing to do.

However from the maintenance perspective we do not commit to regularly maintain Merlin for all opam-supported compiler versions, only the most recent from branches 4 and 5.

I will put latest in our opam files.