> That said, one excellent catalytic change, would be to bring in
> seperate compilation library version dependency analysis (i.e an ocaml
> 3rd party package manager) into the main ocaml distribution. I believe
> there is an ocaml package to do this already, although I'm not sure
> how sound it is.

There are certainly a few "social" technologies that could significantly
boost the usability of OCaml in real-world projects, a good version
management tool for third party sources probably ranking among the "most
missing" ones.

I am highly convinced that the success of some "modern" (?) languages
(Perl, Python, Java) was strongly supported by a (more or less) standard
way of incorporating third-party libraries.

The current state of OCaml is definitely advanced enough to pay more
attention to some "not-so-academic" goals like providing for tools aimed at
extending the user base. I believe this would benefit the whole process a
lot in the future.

> A library calculus system which was URL name space aware would be
> particularly interesting. NetBSD and FreeBSD take this approach in
> their own package source dependency system for instance. Compiling one
> package recursively pulls in, uncompresses, patches, compilies and
> installs the dependencies.

It need not be an "overkill" version right from the beginning - a nice,
clean and (important!) standard way to safely add, update and remove
libraries would surely be a good start.

> Such technology strongly fosters co-operative community.

Taking a look at the Hump and Gerd's link database, I have the impression
that there is already enough "critical mass" of contributors, but most of
the contributions are "one-man-efforts", i.e. nice, but they don't have
enough "punch". Maybe we should really think more about ways to "unleash
the forces of cooperative development". As it seems: easily said, difficult
to do...

Best regards,
Markus Mottl

-- 
Markus Mottl, mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at, http://miss.wu-wien.ac.at/~mottl