dev meeting 2024 09 04

Attendees: @maiste @Leonidas-from-XIV @moyodiallo @lostera

Agenda

• Discussion on package or pkg commands. How should we handle it.
• Discuss assessing some Terminologies: dune-projects, dev-tool, dev-tools.
• Auto re-locking: reminder about the blockers and if there are some possible solutions.

Dev Team Calls (@leostera)

• We should make sure that everyone is onboard wrt to the proper time of the call
• The old invite (with the old time) has been deleted now, to avoid confusion

pkg vs package (@maiste/@leostera)

• We shouldn't choose a prefix because we don't yet know how people are going to use this. Might not even be a prefix, e.g. dune lock or dune add etc.
• Cmdliner has a way of marking options as deprecated so we can remove them later in a kind of nice way
• Q: Will dune pkg lock disappear?
  • No, it's just that people in the DX interview tend to use package
  • We might create dune lock
• Q: If we have autolocking, will we then remove dune pkg lock?
  • No, there's still cases where manually locking could be preferred
• Q: Will we have autolocking?
  • It's a technical challenge to make locking work

Autolocking (@maiste)

• Current solver input is terrible
• Hard to fix because it is a generic SAT solver which doesn't know what the context is of what it is solving, it's used for 0install and hacked to work with Opam packages
• Q: Can we get better output?
  • The solver has a way to get the diagnostics in a structured way
  • opam-monorepo does this, but it is hard to interpret the diagnostics
• Locking as part of build is a technical issue

• It is not a build target and doesn't use the engine
• Q: Can we make it a build target?

• Possibly, but at the moment the engine only writes to _build
• We can promote the results back into the source tree
• Other ways autolocking is done?
  • How does yarn solve this?
    • yarn install/yarn add
  • How does cargo watch solve this?
  • Is there a Go equivalent of this?
    • No watch mode that we know of, at least no official one
  • How does Elixir solve this?
    • A bit different because in Elixir/Erlang you keep the image running, so the overall workflow is pretty different.
• If we want to convert locking into a build target we need to make sure that this is the main blocker

Dev Tool Terminology (@moyodiallo)

• dev-dependencies vs with-dev-setup vs dev-tools vs dev tools
• Should we standardize the terminology?
• Might not be very confusing
• We could avoid introducing another term (dev tools)
• Do we need dev-dependencies? What other ecosystems put into dev-dependencies we mostly have in test

Topics to discuss next (@lostera)

• dune add command
• Github package dependency syntax

OCaml.org (@leostera)

• We'll be working on making the page with the developer preview binaries nicer
• Using the ocaml.org codebase so the change can be upstreamed and we don't need to do the work twice in two different approaches
• We need to eventually use the OCurrent pipeline correctly, to not have to spend a long time at the very end blocked on writing that when we just want to release