Dune wish list for 2023

Community
17

Problem
Iirc, I had similar questions as @Luc_ML on my first starts with dune in regards to the naming conventions of bin/lib/test and why files in subdirectories couldn’t immediately compile. I remember speedrunning through the Examples and https://dune.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quick-start.html to try out some lib, missing some key details here and there haha.

Solution(s)

  1. But maybe a respective readme should be generated with each dune init templates because dune’s quick start docs explain a handful of these questions really early on.

  2. Maybe include_subdirs should be default for new init’ed templates. But now we unknowingly introduce users to the rules of include_subdirs. We do know the dune team is working on (include_subdirs qualified) - thread. So once this is shipped, defaulting new projects to have (include_subdirs qualified/unqualified) may be a great help.

I’m on team-make-startup-as-easy-as-possible because it makes experimentation for new users really easy and lets them continue down the ocaml rabbit hole. I expect software developers to be of the patient, debugging, doc-reading type, but having to dig into build docs when you want to experiment with a library is always a hassle.

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