OCaml Forge

Deprecating the Forge in 2017

This news was initially published as forge.ocamlcore.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=958 on 2016-12-30, it has been migrated to this static website later.

The OCaml Forge was launched 9 years ago. Today, the OCaml community will probably benefit to switch to a more popular hosting option, like Github. Over the course of 2017, the content of the current forge will be transferred to a static website or given back to its author for a migration to another hosting provider.

Background

The main reason of the deprecation is that the overall activity on the forge is low and I am mostly managing spammers on it.

Timeline

The plan is as follow, depending on the time I can spend on this:

Now: this announcement

At this point the forge will not accept any new projects.

Goal: Make the OCaml Forge users aware of the upcoming migration.

Now to April 2017: cleanup

Deprecate 2nd level websites and cleanup content of the forge:

Goal: Have a clean dataset to give back to author and be ready to migrate a clean forge to a static website.

March to November 2017: provide archive of project to users

Generate downloadable archive of projects, including:

I will drop:

There is no plan to provide a script to migrate the downloadable archive to a new project on Github, since there are a lot of possible options for this kind of migration. I will provide a way to read the data in the archive, as an OCaml library, probably with my own migration scripts for the migration.

I will consider the option to do an HTTP redirect from the forge to the new hosting website, if it makes sense.

Goal: Allow former OCaml Forge users to migrate their project to a new hosting.

December 2017: 6. migrate to a static website for the forge.

Final step of the plan, everything switch to a static website.

Goal: Finalize the migration to a static host.

Other options considered

Things I have considered but I won’t do:

The ideas is to move the burden from me to another set of people. This may work for a time but I think ultimately Github is a better option. Better take the decision to end it myself.

Last words

I would like to thank everyone for their support over the years. The OCaml Forge was a great learning experience. At a personal level, I was a big user and it helped me to better work on some of my projects.

See you all on Github https://github.com/gildor478