dev meeting 20210128

Present at the meeting:

• Jérémie Dimino (@jeremiedimino)
• Sonja Heinze (@pitag-ha)
• Nathan Rebours (@NathanReb)

Current plan

• Nathan and Sonja finish the 4.12 AST upgrade
• Nathan releases a new MDX version using ppxlib or at least not conflicting with omp2
• Sonja finishes Astlib

Meeting notes

Sonja finished the bisect_ppx port, CI is failing but at this point it seems like the port is ready and only the maintainers can sort out the last bits before we merge it! 🎉

Nathan finished the 0.21.0 release by fixing the bug the first release attempt revealed and releasing again.

Nathan and Sonja started the upgrade to the 4.12 AST internally. They fixed the initial PR that had one bug and updated the JaneStreet reverse dependencies, only 3 packages were impacted by the AST change but this required some work as they were not all up to date with the latest ppxlib. We've been setting up a github project to better track the progress of the upgrade this time and prevent that from happening again as best as we can. Next step is to look into non-JaneStreet reverse dependencies, send all required patches upstream and then proceed with the actual release of ppxlib.0.22.0.

We'll work on automating this process further to make it simpler and faster. Eventually we'd like to enforce a set of rules maintainers should follow to benefit from those upgrades. This could be checked in a central repository listing all such packages where maintainers could register there packages and have a CI verify every registered package continously follows those rules. It's probably best to refine the tooling for at least another compiler release first to figure out a sensible set of rules and the initial set of packages that will benefit from the upgrades.

We also talked about MDX which hasn't finished upgrading from omp1 to ppxlib. The port PR seems to be stuck and it's pretty high priority to unblock it as it's preventing JaneStreet from upgrading to omp2 and the latest ppxlib. Nathan will look into this.