Discontinuation problem

[stefandd]

The decision to discontinue a native Windows opam by pointing to the use of Dune as a substitute creates a chicken and egg problem since Dune itself is to be installed by using opam The recommended way to install dune is via the opam package manager... (quote from the https://github.com/ocaml/dune). Otherwise Windows users would be forced to build Dune from the sources.

[fdopen]

You can just install the latest version of dune from the normal upstream repository.

If a package uses dune, the package description in this repo and the upstream repo are usually identic.

A seperate repo for Windows was necessary, when the most common build tools didn't support windows very well (there are for example over 200 packages in this repo with patched setup.ml/myocamlbuild.ml files that were generated by oasis). The discontinuation will affect such legacy packages and their dependencies. For "modern" packages, the normal upstream repo will work as well.

[stefandd]

You can just install the latest version of dune from the normal upstream repository.

Unfortunately this does not seem to be true. There is no other native Windows binary distribution of opam than this one. The upstream repository does not offer any such download. Therefore, the problem would remain that dune cannot be installed since a Windows opam distribution won't exist after this is discontinued!