# OPAM

### Why OPAM ?

[OCamlPro](http://www.ocamlpro.com/) has decided to start writing a brand new package manager for [OCaml](http://www.ocaml.org) in the beginning of 2012, after looking at the state of affairs in the OCaml community and not being completely satisfied with the existing solutions, especially regarding the management of dependency constraints between packages. Existing technologies such as [GODI](http://godi.camlcity.org/), [oasis](http://oasis.forge.ocamlcore.org/), [odb](http://oasis.ocamlcore.org/dev/odb/) and [ocamlbrew](https://github.com/hcarty/ocamlbrew) did contain lots of good ideas that have been shamelessly stolen but the final user-experience was not so great -- and due to  disagreements with some of the architectural choices done in these tools, so it wasn't so easy to contribute to fix the existing flaws. Thus OCamlPro started to discuss the specification of a new package manager with folks from [Jane Street](http://www.janestreet.com/) who decided to fund the project and from the [Mancoosi project](http://www.mancoosi.org/) to integrate state-of-the-art dependency management technologies.

After few months of hard-work, and continuous support and resources from [OCamlLabs](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/ocamllabs/) and [INRIA](http://www.inria.fr/) (through funding by the [Feder DORM](http://zenika.github.io/DORM/) project), this effort finally gave birth to the [first official release](http://www.ocamlpro.com/blog/2013/03/14/opam-1.0.0.html) of OPAM in March 2013.

### Getting Support

OPAM has been created and is maintained by [OCamlPro](http://www.ocamlpro.com/). Bug reports and feature requests for the OPAM tool should be reported on [OPAM's issue-tracker](https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues). Packaging issues or requests for a new package can be reported on the [official repository's issue-tracker](https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/issues).

General queries for both the tool and the packages could be addressed on the [OCaml-platform mailing-list](http://lists.ocaml.org/listinfo/platform) and insights and evolution of OPAM internals can discussed on the [OPAM-devel mailing-list](http://lists.ocaml.org/listinfo/opam-devel).

Standard commercial terms and support on OPAM, as well as training and consulting services, are provided by [OCamlPro](http://www.ocamlpro.com/).
