dev meeting 20220321

Present at the meeting:

• Marek Kubica (@Leonidas-from-XIV)
• Nathan Rebours (@NathanReb)

Current Plan

• Nathan keeps working on the tezos build
• Marek finishes the hybrid mode PR
• Marek finishes the dune ports refresh for RWO

Meeting notes

Nathan briefly worked on the tool directly, fixing a bug with newer OCaml releases where the solver would pick the latest beta version if the constraints allowed. This is fixed in #269 and they are now only picked if no regular version meets the requirement.

He also worked on proposing a new workflow for the dune porting process to help maitaining high quality and focused ports. Our recent efforts there made it clear it was required.

Nathan focused remained building tezos with opam-monorepo. Rebasing on top of tezos master required some new ports as some dependencies were updated there: ptime, fmt and camlzip. He also reached out to the jsoo maintainers to get hints on a bug that happens within the tezos duniverse. Jsoo invocations crash with a findlib error complaining about not finding the stdlib package. Nathan still needs to investigate this further. Nathan also looked into upstreaming to opam-overlays some of the ports that were maintained by Craig. This belongs to an effort to make sure the tezos repo can be locked and built without or with as little configuration as possible.

Marek has been working on the hybrid mode. The PR has significantly improved and the code is much clearer now. Lucas ran into a bug when trying this for mirage but this has been fixed as well. The PR should be ready to merge anytime now, we're mostly awaiting Lucas feedback.

Marek has also been working on refreshing our dune ports to update them to their latest upstream release. This quite a significant amount of work but a lot of the ports needed to be improved so this is all for the best. We discovered that some ports were actually not needed. For instance there was a port of topkg, which is just a build system so no dune port was needed obviously. We also had a port for io-page.2.3 even though the upstream already builds with dune. The port refresh work allowed to consistently clean up ports for opam-overlays and overall it will benefit both the users and ourselves.

As part of this effort, Marek worked on a port of cmdliner.1.1.0. It turns out that cmdliner has had dune files upstream for quite a while now. This comes from dune vendoring cmdliner for its own use. We'll try to start upstreaming the dune files to Daniel's package to see if he is willing to merge them. We need to figure out how exactly we are going to maintain them and how we can encode in the opam metadata that opam-monorepo can use the upstream version with dune. We'll start working on various design and discuss this with the maintainers.