I (Florian Angeletti) have started working at Inria Paris this August. A part of my new job is to help deal with the day-to-day care for the OCaml compiler, particularly during the release process. This blog post is a short glimpse into the life of an OCaml release.

OCaml and the opam repository

Currently, the song of the OCaml development process is a canon with two voices: a compiler release spends the first 6 months of its life as the trunk branch of the OCaml compiler git repository. Then after those 6 first months, it is named and given a branch on its own. For instance, this happened on October 18 2019 for OCaml 4.10 . Starting from this point, the branch is feature-frozen: only bug fixes are merged, whereas new feature development happens in trunk . Our objective is then to release the new version 3 months later. If we succeed, there are at most two branches active at the same time.

Dev Dev Dev Dev Dev Dev Bug Dev Bug Dev RCs Dev Dev Dev Dev Bug Dev Bug Dev RCs Dev Dev Dev Dev Bug Bug Rcs

However, the OCaml compiler does not live in isolation. It makes little point to release a new version of OCaml which is not compatible with other parts of the OCaml ecosystem.

The release cycle of OCaml 4.08 was particularly painful from this point of view: we refactored parts of the compiler API that were not previously versioned by ocaml-migrate-parsetree, making it more difficult to update. In turn, without a working version of ocaml-migrate-parsetree, ppxses could not be built, breaking all packages that depend on them. It took months to correct the issue. This slip of schedule affected the 4.09.0 release and can still be felt on the 4.11 schedule.

Catching knifes before the fall

Lesson learned, we need to test the packages in the opam repository more often. Two tools in current usage can automate such testing: opamcheck and opam-health-check.

The two tools attack the problem with a different angle. The opam-health-check monitoring tool is developed to check the coherency of the opam repository, for released OCaml versions.

In a complementary way, opamcheck was written by Damien Doligez to check how well new versions of the OCaml compiler fare in terms of building the packages in the opam repository.

A typical difference between opamcheck and opam-health-check is that opamcheck is biased towards newer versions of the compiler: if an opam package builds on the latest unreleased version of the compiler, we don’t need to test it with older compilers. After all, we are mostly interested in packages that are broken by the new release. The handful of packages that may be coincidentally fixed by an unreleased compiler are at most a curiosity; pruning those unlikely events saves us some precious time.

Since I started at Inria, in the midst of the first beta of OCaml 4.09.0 , I have been working with opamcheck to monitor the state of the opam repository.

The aim here is twofold. First, we want to detect expected breakages that are just a sign that a package needs to be updated before the final release of the new compiler version. The earliest we catch those, the more time the maintainers have to patch their packages. Second, we want to detect unexpected compatibility issues and breakages.

One fun example of such unexpected compatibility issue appeared in the 4.09.0 release cycle. When I first used opamcheck to test the state of the first 4.09.0 beta, there was a quite problematic broken package: dune. This was quite stunning at first, because the 4.09.0 version of OCaml contained mostly bug fixes and small quality-of-life improvements. That was at least what I had told a few worried people a few days earlier…

So what was happening here? The issue stemmed from a small change of behaviour in presence of missing compiled interface ( cmi ) files : dune was relying on an unspecified OCaml compiler behaviour in such cases, and this behaviour had been altered by a mostly unrelated improvement in the typechecker.

This change of behaviour was patched and dune worked fine in the second beta release of 4.09.0 . And this time, the next run of opamcheck confirmed that that 4.09.0 was a quiet release.

This is currently the main use of opamcheck: check the health status of the opam repository on unreleased version of OCaml before opam-health-check more extensive coverage takes the relay. One of our objectives for the future 4.10.0 release is to achieve a much more extensive test coverage, before the first beta.

Opam and the PRs

There is another possible use of opamcheck that is probably much more useful to the anxious OCaml developer: opamcheck can be used to check that a PR or an experimental branch does not break opam packages. A good example is #8900: this PR proposes to remove the special handling of abstract types defined inside the current module. This special case looks nice locally, but it allows to write some code which is valid if and only if it is located in the right module, without any possibility to correct this behaviour by making module signatures more precise.

It is therefore quite tempting to try to remove this special case from the typechecker, but is it reasonable?

This was another task for opamcheck. First, I added a new opamcheck option to easily check any pull request on the OCaml compiler. After some work, there was some good news: this pattern is mostly unused in the current opam repository.

Knowing whether there are any opam packages that rely on this feature is definitively a big help when taking these decisions.

Using opamcheck

So if you are a worried OCaml developer and want to test your fancy compiler PR on the anvil of the opam repositoy, what are the magical incantations?

One option is to download the docker image octachron/opamcheck with

docker pull octachron/opamcheck

Beware that the image weighs around 7 GiB. It is also possible to build and run opamcheck locally as detailed in the readme. However, in this short blog post, I will present the latter option. It has the advantages of being relatively lightweight in terms of configuration, and makes it easier to test your legions of PRs simultaneously (you don’t have legions of PRs, do you?)

Once the image is downloaded, there are three main ways to run it. If you want to compare several versions of the compiler (given as switch names), let’s say 4.05 , and 4.08.1+flambda and 4.10.0+trunk , you can run:

docker run -v opamcheck:/app/log -p 8080:80 --name=opamcheck opamcheck run -online-summary=10 4.05.0 4.08.1+flambda 4.10.0

The -name option is the docker container name. The -p option maps the port 80 of the container to the port 8080 of the host, this is used to connect to the http server embedded in the image. Finally, the -v flag let us choose the location of opamcheck log directory in the host file system. (If you forget this option, a random docker volume name will be used.) Here, it will be at /var/lib/docker/volumes/opamcheck .

While opamcheck is runnning, its progress can be checked with either

sudo tail -f /var/lib/docker/volumes/opamcheck_log/_data/results

or by pointing a web browser to localhost:8080/fullindex.html . Note that the first summary is only generated after the OCaml compiler is built and all uninstallable packages have been discovered. On my machine, this rounds up at a 15 minutes wait before the first summary is generated. Later updates should be more frequent.

The result should look like this summary run for OCaml 4.10.0 . The integer parameter in -online-summary=n corresponds to the update period for this html summary. If the option is not provided, the html summary is only built at the end of the run.

If you are more interested by testing a specific PR, for instance #8900, the prmode mode works better

docker run -p 80:8080 opamcheck --name=opamcheck prmode -online-summary=10 -pr 8900 4.09.0

This command tries to rebase the given PR on top of the given OCaml version (switch name); it fails immediately if the PR cannot be rebased; in this case you should use the latest trunk switch as base or use the branch option, described below. When possible, it is a good idea to use a released version as the base: with a released version, there are more unbroken packages to test your patch against.

If the branch that you want to test is not yet a PR, or needs some manual rebasing to be compared against a specific compiler version, there is a -branch flag. For instance, let’s say that you have a branch my_very_experimental_branch at the location nowhere.org . You can run

docker run -p 80:8080 opamcheck --name=opamcheck prmode -online-summary=10 -branch https://nowhere.org:my_very_experimental_branch 4.09.0

This command downloads the branch at nowhere.org and compare it against the 4.09.0 switch.

Currently, a full run of opamcheck takes one or two days: you will likely get the results before your first PR review. A limitation is the false positive rate: most opam package descriptions are incomplete or out of date, so packages will fail for reasons unrelated to your PR. Unfortunately, this means that there is still some manual triage needed after an opamcheck run.

There are four main objectives for opamcheck in the next months:

improve its usability

share more code with opam-health-check, at least on the frontend

reduce the false positive rate

reduce the time required by a CI run

If you want to check on future development for opamcheck, and a potentially more up-to-date readme, you can have a look at Octachron/opamcheck.