dev meeting 20200716

Present at the meeting:

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

Current plan

• Nathan takes care of the 1.7.0 release
• Nathan starts reviewing Guillaume's pending PRs
• Sonja works on #269

Meeting notes

Guillaume fixed the bugs uncovered by Nathan when testing mdx's master with RealWorldOcaml so now we're ready for a 1.7.0 release which will ship a lot of nice new features and that will allow us to deprecate their older alternatives in a future release.

Nathan has spent some time investigating a change in behaviour since the last released version and discovered it was a side effect of Guillaume's work to improve the management of environments in Ocaml blocks. It looks more like a fix than a bug so we'll stick to it and will propagate those changes in rev-deps when releasing.

There are a lot of good features awaiting for review right now, Nathan will look into this after the release.

The next big feature is an improvement of the mdx stanza in dune to allow support of private libraries. That will also allow users not to rely on ocamlfind to load external libraries if they do not wish to do so. We want to be able to load through ocamlfind in RWO so it's important this remains possible in the future as well. Guillaume did the preliminary work required on mdx's side, the next step is to do the work in dune, it's most likely that Nathan will take care of it.

Sonja just joined the team so she'll start with a simple yet important feature: #269. The README documentation needs a bit of refresh so once she's a bit more accustomed to the tool she'll start looking into this as well.