dev meeting 2024 10 30

Agenda

• Release 3.16.1
• Is there a way to define a true alias without having to insert it in a rule?

Minutes

Attendees: @maiste @moyodiallo @ElectreAAS @rgrinberg @Leonidas-from-XIV

Release 3.16.1 (@maiste)

We are releasing this patch version of dune 3.16 to incorporate a small change necessary for the beta version of ocaml.5.3.0. This is in a good way, and most of it went smooth. We need to discuss the 3.17 release because it will take more time to be release as there will be some regressions.

Alias in dune (@maiste)

• Having a generalised method is not needed because in terms of dune, an alias is a reference inside a directory.
• For @pkg-deps, we want the alias to be either at toplevel (workspace) or attached to a directory (here dune.lock).
  • We want it to use the targets as a dependency, not the source as it is the case today.
  • We also need to take care about the extra sources from opam as dependencies.
  • Building the archive means downloading it and then build it.
• When attaching alias, it has to be done on the source tree, otherwise dune won't be able to find it.
• Cookies for dune are more or less a binary version of the .install file.
• We can change the name to pkg-install instead of pkg-deps. Would be better as it would be more related to the @install alias.

Disjunction (@Leonidas-from-XIV)

When there is a disjunction in opam file (using or), in the current situation, we need to choose one package. A solution would be to warn the user that we can select two options and request that the user chooses by explicitly adding the dependency.

"Unvendor" the 0install solver (@ElectreAAS)

To give us more control over the solver and the errors printed, we have decided to extract it and have our "own" version of the 0install solver.