Travis build ocamlnat

[chambart]

To prevent ocamlnat from being continuously broken, I suggest that we should add it to the travis script.
This is minimal (as we don't test if it works). For a better test, we should probably have an --with-ocamlnat configure flag to build it in make world and be able to test its presence in the testsuite makefiles.

[gasche]

The question is: who is willing to take the responsibility to fix it when it breaks? @chambart? @trefis? @mshinwell? It would be important to have at least one person to complain to when it breaks.

[trefis]

That's feels like a silly question.
If I go modify something somewhere and it breaks the compilation of typecore.ml you wouldn't expect me to say "well Jacques, I have a present for you, enjoy.".

:)

That being said I'm probably the one who cares most about ocamlnat and I'm fine with looking over it/helping people fix it.

[mshinwell]

@gasche : @trefis is hereby volunteered

[gasche]

@trefis : I think you are correct in that my question was not very
well framed. I suspect people that need to touch this piece of code
may want to know who they can ask for guidance -- and someone
to review pull requests touching this code.

Thinking more about this (your fault!), I think that the current state
of extreme duplication of the two codebase means that the maintenance
burden on contributors is high. It's not really that changes affecting
ocamlnat would be difficult; on the contrary, in most cases they would
be exact copies of those touching the toplevel, and this is painfully
boring.

If it was my call (it isn't), I would not ask contributors to keep
this piece of code updated before we merge some serious attempt at
factoring the bytecode and native toplevel codebases.

[trefis]

I think that the current state of extreme duplication of the two codebase means that the maintenance
burden on contributors is high. It's not really that changes affecting ocamlnat would be difficult; on the contrary, in most cases they would be exact copies of those touching the toplevel, and this is painfully boring.

I agree with you there.
Apart from my old attempt I haven't looked at this at all, but I hope to be able to spend some time after the release to clean things up and factorize. I've previously refrained from doing so because I didn't really know how things where going to evolve w.r.t. flambda.