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dev meeting 20190318
It is quite annoying to not be able to use new OCaml features in dune
or other platform tools. Indeed, very often these tools need to stay
compatible with older compiler. The future_syntax feature comes in
handy.
@diml proposes that we extend this feature to cover more language features, such as inline records. This would be especially relevant for the work being done in ppxlib, as using inline records in the representation of the stable AST would be very relevant.
If we want to support such features, we can no longer rely on the same
mechanism we used for let+. Instead, we need to have our own OCaml
parser in Dune. As usual, with recent versions of OCaml
future_syntax will do nothing, and with older ones, it will be a
preprocessor that uses our own parser. This parser will basically use
the lexical conventions and grammar of the last version of OCaml, but
will produce an AST that is accepted by the version of OCaml in use.
This will add a bit more code to dune, though the value seems worth it.
Conclusion: let's ask the community what versions of OCaml they care about before doing anything. With a bit of luck, we don't need to care about 4.02 anymore.
We have a small cram testing framework in dune that is really useful to write integration tests. There is also the craml project which might be a more polished version.
Since this kind of testing would be useful in many projects, it would be nice to formalize them a bit more and make them easy to use in dune projects.
We talked about having a light plugin system in Dune which would cover this. Though having something specific to cram tests might make sense anyway and would take less time to integrate.
Conclusion: not discussed
what is the recommended way to run tests in the CI?
Related to #2082.
Conclusion: not sure how much it's worth doing. They are many different ways to define tests and enforcing that all tests are attached to a package might be a lot of churn. We need more feedback and numbers to justify being strict about attachement of tests to packages.
There is a problem at the moment with library variants: the choice of implementation depends on what's installed on the system, which is not great. We are going to limit the feature to the strict minimum, i.e. one will only be able to declare variants for virtual libraries in the same project. We will then wait for usage feedback.
The feature is reaching completion. Before releasing, we want to make
sure that dune can generate the whole opam file. The last fields dune
can't generate at the moment are build and depopts. We are going
to add support for specifying these in the dune-project file.
Work is continuing to make Dune support Coq. The design is still being worked on.
We'd like to start distributing the dune binary via more distributions
platforms such a homebrew. This would be only the dune binary, not
accompanying libraries such as dune.configurator.