Module dependency error when building master

[danking]

I had to install a few packages using opam, but otherwise I simply have a fresh clone of the iron repo. I tried to make clean; make but it failed after a bunch of seemingly OK output. The failure message is:

Module Iron_command_rpc_intf in directory _build/default/public depends on Iron.
This doesn't make sense to me.

Iron is the main module of the library and is the only module exposed 
outside of the library. Consequently it should be the one dependending 
on all the other modules in the library.

My system:

• Mac OS 10.12.6
• opam 1.2.2
• ocaml 4.05.0
• jbuilder 1.0+beta14

Both ocaml and opam were installed with brew (version 1.3.6-8-g15096e7).

[yminsky]

Sorry, we really should just delete this repo. We open-sourced Iron, but it takes a fair amount of work to adapt it for real uses, and it doesn't seem like anyone is seriously contemplating that work, so we stopped updating it in our public release. Now it's just an attractive nuisance, because it makes people think it's a supported piece of software.

That said, if someone actually wants to do the work to set it up for their use-cases, we'd be happy to think about starting up the release again.

[danking]

It depends what the lift is, obviously. We're a rather small outfit, which both limits our ability to build tools but also makes tools important to focusing our efforts away from the little things.

The branching model we use seems to align with the model y'all use at Jane Street, i.e. feature branches on feature branches, reviewing each bit independently, merging earlier ones when ready and rebasing the dependent ones on the new upstream. As I'm sure you're aware, GitHub does not provide great support for this model.

I cloned Iron in order to better understand the model y'all use as well as the model-supporting tools y'all've built. If Iron fits our use-case well enough, I planned to bring it back to the team for consideration.

I should note: we're not living in the ocaml universe. The hail project (https://github.com/hail-is/hail) is written in Scala, Java, & C++, and we may move to a larger C++ component in the future. It sounds like Iron might be tied up with (or is?) a continuous deployment system as well. We currently have a system set up for CD with which I'm mostly happy; however, if Iron isn't too tied to ocaml, then perhaps I could move everything into Iron.

I guess I still have a lot of questions 😅! I'd love to be able to explore Iron a bit more to answer these questions for myself, so I'd appreciate y'all releasing it at least one more time.

[danking]

And no apologies necessary, I really appreciate what y'all contribute to the community.

[yminsky]

Sorry for not responding earlier, but I don't think we're going to do another release at this point.