dev meeting 2025 10 15

• Tutorial session on rules (@shonfeder)
  • Will coordinate with @alitzer and @rgrinberg
• Perms to update CI branch protections (@shonfeder)
  • @rgrinberg not present, will follow up async
• Vendoring (@alitzer)
  • For each package we have a script, that fetches the source code needed
  • Currently doesn't have any checks/validation
  • Ali has re-implemented the vendoring logic in ocaml
  • The work on this is done
  • Shon:
    • Concerned about why we cannot do this in git already
      • git submodules
        • Ali: complicates development practices somewhat
      • or just principled operation to pull
  • Ali: Plan is to rempliment as much opam stuff as possible
    • Shon the vision and plan (afaik) has always been to share as much code with opam as possible
    • Marek: there were too many technical challenges
  • Today we have bash scripts that vendor, but they don't work well
    • Agreement amongst team is that this is important enough and causes enough problems that it is worth prioritizing trying to land the vendoring code
• Behavior of dev tools re: auto-updates
  • Supposing you have run dune tools install dune-release last week, the opam repository version is updated in the meantime, and then you run dune tools exec dune-release
  • Should the behavior be:
    1. Just run dune-release, or
    2. First check and update the opam-repo, find a new version, than download and install the latest version
  • Shon: it must be (1), IMO, We cannot try to execute a tool and instead it just suddenly starts executing instead of running
  • Marke: we should update, because otherwise people end up with out of date tools
  • Ali:
    • At minimum, needs to be able to fail gracefully when there is no network connection
    • If we make this configurable, then people who don't want the implicit update can disable it
    • Ali: Microsoft force-updates, so we should take that into account, some/many users may expect this
  • Possible design problem with dev-tools?
    • Shon: thinks that dune tools exec should not install the versions too -- certainly should not reinstall updated versions
  • Arthur: I would be upset if I tried to rebuild a project while debugging and suddenly the dependencies were updated and there were, e.g., new type errors with deps introduced
  • Conclusion: we probably need more design work and discussion here