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dev meeting 20191126
Emilio mentions tht dropping support for 4.05.0 might make some users unhappy. These are users that install OCaml via the official debian package and then install dune, coq and other packages via packages provided by third-party sources. Debian stable only has OCaml 4.05.0.
Indeed, providing third party packages for various OCaml packages is fine, but providing a third-party package for the compiler itself is a bit more tedious and controversial.
Increasing the window of supported OCaml versions to 4 versions would mean that 4.05.0 would be supported for a bit longer. However, it wouldn't be that long as we expect to move to 4.09 soon, i.e. as soon as merlin supports 4.09.
Additionally, it is expected that most people are now using opam and installing their OCaml compiler through opam. So it's not clear how many people will be affected by dropping support for 4.05.0.
As a result, we decided to keep with the current plan for now. If the worst came to the worst and our new policy was making things impossible for users, we could always change it. As a result, there is no urgency. In any case, we should keep an eye out for feedback from users about this.
We are also thinking of exploring alternatives such as distributing pre-built binaries of Dune or (@dra27 you should stop reading here if you don't have spare time in the near future! 🙈) providing a tarball that would include the sources of both Dune and a recent version of the compiler and would build just enough of the compiler to be able to build Dune, possibly always in bytecode and using only the bootstrap compiler for simplicity.
Such solutions would probably not be acceptable for the official packages from Linux distributions, but for third-party distributors this would probably be much less of a concern.
We discussed the fact that dune enables a different set of warnings by default in development mode, following a comment from Xavier Leroy. We decided to keep the status quo, although Jeremie got the comment slightly wrong; the complaint was about the fact that these are treated as error rather than the set of enabled warnings.
Since we restarted the talks about plugins, Emilio is wondering about relying on this for Coq, rather than have all the logic backed into Dune.
We didn't talk much about this as this was the end of the meeting, but making this possible would probably require adding a few more general features in Dune, given that for now we are only talking about plugins that can generate plain stanzas. i.e. they won't have access to Dune's internal APIs.
JS is making progress with building its mono-repo with Dune. The initial builds where failing after consuming all the memory (>30GB). With the help of spacetime, it was easy to identify things that could be shared and bring back the memory usage under control (<5GB).