dev meeting 20210317

Present at the meeting:

• Guillaume Petiot (@gpetiot)
• Sonja Heinze (@pitag-ha)
• Nathan Rebours (@NathanReb)

Current plan

• Nathan make sure the opam 1.x deprecation is consistent
• Nathan release 1.5.0
• Plan the 2.0.0 release, both with features and time estimate

Meeting notes

The draft mode PR is finally ready to be merged, there are still some things that are unclear regarding the behaviour of the undraft command as for now it will likely override any changes the user might have made to the opam files in the opam-repository PR. We discussed whether or not it should behave like this and the conclusion was a bit mixed. It might not be desirable to have the opam file in the tarball and the one on opam-repository diverge, at least for the initial release. Considering this, it might make sense that undraft only works if the opam files are unchanged, and advise you to re-release otherwise. That being said, we already modify opam files before going through with releases without re-generating the tarballs and creating new tags and releases. From a certain perspective, it might also be seen as pointless to aim at having the same opam file in the tarball and on opam-repository at release time since opam-repository can be modified later anyway. We need to define what's the "blessed" workflow before moving forward on this, supporting both seems possible, using a warning and a prompt when the opam file has been modified might be the way to go here. We believe the feature already provides value in its current state and considering it is flagged as experimental, we can improve it later as we get feedback!

The check PR is also ready to be merged. We discussed further improvement, mostly clarifying which checks are performed, even when they are successful. We also need to add a check that the project name is set in dune-project as dune subst fails if it's not. Sonja will take care of these before we cut 1.5.0 tomorrow.

We discussed dune-release handling of multi-opam repository and one can use dune-release to batch release several repositories at once. Those are important topics that we need to consider as we try to improve the tool as they require deeper changes to the tool but also to others in the ecosystem. In the next few weeks we'll work on a long term plan to solve these so that we can open the discussion with users and other maintainers and get things moving on the multi-opam front as the situation is currently unsatisfactory.

We're running a bit late on our original schedule but the plan is still to move towards 2.0.0 quickly after 1.5.0. We'll start some serious planning for 2.0.0 as we already said we would. The goal is to have a clear set of features that will make it in 2.0.0, a good time estimate of when it will be released and a broader, longer term roadmap for the future of dune-release!