Question about OCaml Compiler Packages

[sabine]

What I've seen:

• For ocaml-base-compiler, documentation is generated successfully at https://ocaml.org/p/ocaml-base-compiler/5.0.0/doc/index.html.
• Stdlib is not published as an opam package. It would be helpful to have it as an opam package so that people can browse the standard library docs via the ocaml.org UI instead of via v2.ocaml.org, see Feature request: put ocaml official stdlib as a package on the website ocaml.org#1403.
• base-unix is an opam package, but the documentation at https://ocaml.org/p/base-unix/latest is empty for some reason (documentation for the Unix and UnixLabels modules exists in the ocaml-base-compiler docs, however).

It would be very helpful to have both a comprehensive list of all compiler packages and to make their documentation available through OCaml.org so people can benefit from in-package documentation search on the OCaml.org package pages.

For this, every compiler-related opam package should be published in such a way that the documentation builds with odoc.

[raphael-proust]

Stdlib is not distributed as an opam package. We worry that adding an "empty" package for documentation only would create confusion and complication.

The easiest way to detect that a package is an ocaml compiler is if it has the flags: compiler entry in the opam package. Would it be possible to special case packages with this field to be given the name "Stdlib" on the documentation index?

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The base-unix package is actually not useful anymore. We are thinking about what would be a reasonable way to transition it out of the repository.

[sabine]

As far as I understand, the ocaml-base-compiler packages contain much more documentation than just that of the standard library, which is quite unfortunate for search purposes.

We would have to limit the search results in some way to just those that https://ocaml.org/releases/latest/api/index.html provides, to get a good UX.