OCaml 4.04, RISC-V, S/390, POWER and more …

I pushed OCaml 4.04.0 to Fedora Rawhide last week. There are loads of new features for OCaml users, but the ones that particularly affect Fedora are:

• New, upstream POWER (ppc64, ppc64le) backend, replacing the downstream one that we have maintained for a few years. I was quite apprehensive about this change because I had tried the new backend during the OCaml 4.03 release cycle and found it to be quite unstable. However the latest version looks rock solid and has no problem compiling the entire Fedora+OCaml software suite.
• New, upstream S/390x backend. I actually found and fixed a bug, go me!
• New, non-upstream RISC-V backend. I found a bug in this backend too, but it proved to be easy to fix. You can now install and run most of the OCaml packages on Fedora/RISC-V.

And talking about Fedora/RISC-V, it took a month, but the mass-rebuild of all Fedora packages completed, and now we’ve got about ⅔rds of all Fedora packages available for RISC-V. That’s quite a lot:

$ du -sh SRPMS/ RPMS/
31G	SRPMS/
27G	RPMS/