dev meeting 2026 04 15

Agenda

• (none)

Meeting notes

Attendees: Chukwuma Akunyili, @ElectreAAS, @Sudha247, @Leonidas-from-XIV, @Alizter, @shonfeder, @art-w

Next release (Ali)

• Shon plans on releaseing 3.23
• Branching today or tomorrow
• Ali is not aware of any in-progress work that would block releasing
• Maybe we can just cut the release so if something needs to be done it can be accomodated after the fact instead of waiting for everyone's OK
• What is our release philosophy?
  • If we change it so main is always releasable
    • we could do patch releases if there are no breaking chnages
    • minor releases otherwise
• Process improvements are slowing down in the short-term but hopefully speed up in the long-term
• If it doesn't work we can always just re-cut the release branch
• Release ticket with deadline to announce the branch-date
• People will give us feedback on the release process so if it is bad we can improve it

Dev tools (Shon)

• Are we developing dev-tools and dune pkg in alignment with the Platform Roadmap
• "Dune becomes the frontend for the OCaml ecosystem"
• Is it, if it does not support system-wide installation?
• What about non-project attached tools?
  • Like odig or utop
• There are different kinds of "global installation"
  • Installing stuff in /usr/bin
  • Using stuff outside of particular projects
• Tools are often fairly tiled to the OCaml version
  • e.g. when using utop you want a specific compiler version most likely
• Non-requirement in the spec does not mean anti-requirement
• If we want to have global installation as requirement, we need to specify it closer instead of just saying it should be supported
• Do we need to have it as requirement to make sure that it can be implemented in the future (i.e. not dig ourselves into a hole)?
• How do we determine whether it is even a requirement?
  • Should we post on discuss and ask?
  • Users when faced with a question will always say yes
  • But to determine if users need it is requirement engineering
• How exact does a specification need to be?