dev meeting 20210225

Present at the meeting:

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

Current plan

• Clarify ppxlib's API by listing all modules rather than using includes
• Create a repositories with a dune workspace for building ppxlib and its reverse dependencies
• Sonja keeps working on Astlib

Meeting notes

Sonja investigated how the lexer module that is re-exposed by ppxlib is used in our reverse dependencies. It turns out that it is used by a few, so far 5 out of the set of Janestreet ppx-es, we still need to look into the other packages. It's important to understand how this module is used by our reverse dependencies as we're at the point where we need to decide whether this is something that needs to go into Astlib or not. Sonja will look into this.

Given that building with our rev-deps is something that we're doing more and more, it might be good to extract a repo that we can just clone and build. It will obviously need to be synched with the universe regularly but until we have proper tooling to assemble this fast and easily, this will prove quite handy.

Another thing we discussed is that the public API of ppxlib is not quite as clear as it should be because of the use of module includes. We're at a point where we want to closely watch what is exposed in ppxlib and we need to improve that. A good first step would be to replace includes with explicit module aliases so that we clearly state what we expose, at least at the module level. There are still some module that we include to move the functions they provide up in the toplevel ppxlib namespace, we'll keep those as is for now.