Unfortunately it is unreasonable to merge both options in the same release, because that means that people will have no backward-compatible way to disable the feature. I'm sorry for this glaring omission of the format work. We should merge -no-strict-formats as soon as possible, and wait a bit before considering a switch in default.

Thanks a lof for the PR though; this is a glaring omission. Would you be ready to rebase the PR with just support for -no-strict-formats and no default change?

@damiendoligez would you agree with a -no-strict-formats option merged in 4.03?

(We should think of adding -no-strict-sequence as well, just in case.)

@gasche Should I issue that PR against 4.03? If so, it might be possible to add -no-strict-formats in 4.03 and make -strict-formats the default in 4.04?

Don't both with the 4.03/4.04 thing, I can change it at merge time.

We can make -strict-formats the default as soon as all OCaml versions the majority of our users care about support -no-strict-formats. (My personal test is to look at what Debian Stable has, but there is no hard rule.) I think we aim for a shorter release cycle for 4.04, so it may actually be released too fast for that.

because that means that people will have no backward-compatible way to disable the feature

I generally agree with this line of thoughts ( and this is actually why I opened http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=7184 ). But for this specific case, fixing invalid formats should be rather straightforward and would give an easy way to make the code base compatible with whatever release.

I think this is a good argument, thanks. Thinking about it in this way, I would be ready to always enable strict formats (making the configuration option a legacy, ignored option) in trunk (4.04+dev).

(-no-strict-sequence is still an important flag that it would make sense to have as soon as possible, including in 4.03, I think.)

(-no-strict-sequence is still an important flag that it would make sense to have as soon as possible, including in 4.03, I think.)

Agreed. Here is a list of other flags to think about:

-no-keep-docs
-no-keep-locs
-alias-deps
-app-funct
-no-principal
-no-rectypes

We can have all of them for the pleasure of completeness, but I don't see OCaml switching to ambiant recursive types by the time 4.03 hits Debian stable. All the others definitely make sense. Do I understand correctly that you ( @damiendoligez ) would be interested in a patch implementing all these (trivial) flags? What is your inclination for (-no)-strict-formats?

Implement them all (including -no-strict-formats), we'll switch the default to -strict-formats in 4.04.

@drbo
Are you willing to change this PR to add the missing flags and remove the switch to strict-formats?
I would need this within a few days.

@damiendoligez Fixed and pushed

I reviewed the proposed patch and it looked fine.

I'm about to merge the branch in 4.03 and trunk.

@drbo it appears to me that, despite what the Changes entry says, you do not support -app-funct and and -alias-deps.

I rebased and merged in trunk ( 795a4d5 ) and 4.03 ( 0f4fea9 ). Thanks!

Feel free to ping us after the release if we forget to make -strict-formats the default in 4.04+dev. (I'd rather not do it right now to avoid diverting effort handling any format-breakage from the release work.)