Skip to content

dev meeting 2025 03 19

Jump to bottom Edit New page
art-w edited this page Mar 19, 2025 · 6 revisions

Agenda

  • Relocatable OCaml (@dra27)
  • Communication about the experimental features. Could we add them to the CHANGELOG but mark them as experimental (@maiste)
  • Synopsis for aliases (see issue#11522) (@maxim092001)
  • Enable package management when using --release (see PR#11378) (@Leonidas-from-XIV)

Meeting notes

@dra27 relocatable compiler works! Last week was about doing the same changes to ocamlfind and ocamlbuild to avoid any dependencies on build paths:

  • Relocatable is a stronger guarantee than reproducible, since it's always reproducible independent of location (harder to implement but then no need for a set an absolute path like Nix, or to patch the binary to rewrite paths for the new location)
  • Demo of the relocatable compiler! (on windows!)
  • Paths to lib are found relative to the location of ocamlfind (assumes an opam-like installation with bin/ folder and libraries accessible via ../lib/ from the binary)
  • Questions about whether the ocamlfind binary in the right path from the lib/ folder, and some solutions to set the OCAMLPATH as dune knows a lot about which binaries/libraries have been installed
  • Maybe available in next OCaml release

Try it with:

$ opam repo add --dont-select relocatable git+https://github.com/dra27/opam-repository.git#relocatable
$ mkdir test && cd test
$ opam switch create . --repos=relocatable,default ocaml.5.3.1
$ opam install ocamlbuild ocamlfind

Then the test folder can be renamed/copied elsewhere, and this should still work:

$ ocamlopt -where
$ ocamlbuild -where
$ ocamlfind printconf

@maiste Add packagement management features in the changelog, but flagged as experimental?

  • @Leonidas as an experimental section in the changelog? a bit more work for releases but doable
  • Add a tag in PRs/changelog entries to flag as experimental

@maiste (for @maxim): How to document aliases? with which of the three options proposed? ( https://github.com/ocaml/dune/issues/11522 )

  • @Leonidas additive aggregation v2 makes the most sense (the file locs are also available so we can go for this proposal)

@Leonidas-from-XIV: --release disables the package management feature, so instead you have to specify more flags (as --release is an alias for a bunch of flags, including --ignore-lock-dir). Remove --ignore-lock-dir from --release? See https://github.com/ocaml/dune/pull/11378

  • Number of packages affected by this change is rather small. If there's no lock dir then package management is ignored anyway so little impact.
  • 3 or 4 packages to fix: normally easy to fix by adding -p, but some issues with vendoring in old versions of ocamllsp (?)
  • For FramaC either fix with --release --ignore-lock-dir or add the necessary -p

@Manas(prometheansacrifice) How to help dune on windows? Is it too early or will the team be receptive to PRs?

  • @Leonidas: @gridbugs was working on this too, main issue was the tooling
  • @Manas: What to do with cygwin? cygwin is expected by a bunch of stuff, should cygwin be bundled with dune? (the compiler doesn't work without cygwin)
  • @Leonidas: cygwin should probably be part of the binary distribution yes. There's a windows roadmap by @Sudha247 and @Leostera, also questions are welcome in dune github issues
  • @Manas: when compiling the compiler on windows, libraries from cygwin/mingw environment are required (it would be very ambitious to do without cygwin)
  • Perhaps this can also be fixed by binary distribution of compiler and tooling?
Add a custom footer
Clone this wiki locally