dev meeting 2024 02 07

Present: @electreaas @emillon @gridbugs @leonidas-from-xiv

• using utf8 for dune files (@emillon)

  • refs: #9728, #9396
  • should we mandate utf8 encoding for dune files?
    • seems fine
  • if we do that, we can let the formatter output utf8
  • atoms are lexed more strictly and are already a subset of 7-bit ASCII, so utf8 extensions will mostly appear in quoted strings
  • things like library names are also validated so this is not about proposing utf8 in there
  • accepting BOM in output
    • BOM in utf8 is not really useful but some tools (especially on windows) emit it
    • it's not really possible to accept it (because it would break old dunes parsing new files)
    • but it's possible to detect it while parsing and emit a good error message

• progressive enhancement based on packages (@emillon)

  • some integrations can be "enhanced" optionally
  • 2 recent exemples:
    • if sherlodoc is installed, it is used by the docs rules
    • is ocaml-index is installed, it is used to build an index for merlin
  • it feels like a hack if uninstalling the package is the only option
  • ok for a first version, but needs to be moved to a config file or tool configuration (e.g. odoc)
  • one problem is that there's no good place to configure this

• pkg rules blockers (@leonidas-from-xiv)

  • actually not that many blockers
  • ocamlfind
  • ocaml compiler
    • main plan is to wait for relocatable patches
    • use system compiler in the meantime