@jonmsterling It's probably because you're upgrading everything at the same time; OCaml version, opam repository, ppx? But ppx is always the biggest culprit: it's extremely complex and I just avoid a dependency on it unless I need it
I believe in the sincere efforts put forward by an overworked team... I also believe in the promise of OCaml and the need for continued industrial and academic support of work on OCaml — both to evolve the language and to harden the toolchain.
The issues I repeatedly face can probably be addressed by various workarounds, discussing on the forum, etc. Maybe my current issue is yet another case of "user error". But it doesn't matter.
I am very busy. I need to invest my extremely limited time and attention in platforms where basic reliability is a high priority. OCaml toolchain's unreliability has been a problem for a number of years, and although numerous improvements to OPAM's functionality have been made (and Dune has brought many of its own improvements), this has not seen the overall papercut to "it's actually working" ratio decrease.
Perhaps OCaml should be thought of as the Arch Linux of programming languages. It's completely enlightened, extensively documented, all errors are user errors, and it is guaranteed that your system will break if you leave it unattended for more than six months.
@jonmsterling It's probably because you're upgrading everything at the same time; OCaml version, opam repository, ppx? But ppx is always the biggest culprit: it's extremely complex and I just avoid a dependency on it unless I need it
@avsm I've been using OCaml 5.3 for several months, and I have started with a completely fresh .opam months ago, so I'm not sure if I can attribute the problem to this... But it's hard to say. When I get some time (ha!) I will blow away .opam once again and see what happens.
You're right about ppx — this is a big source of breakage.
