Dune wish list for 2023

Community
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First, thanks for your work on dune!
Recapping what I wrote somewhere else, I think newcomers, students and even developer of simple projects would really benefit from:

  • specifying a single dune (or dune-project as you propose) file (e.g. with the subdir stanza you’re talking about)
  • having a simple stanza and way to call dune such that warnings are kept as plain warnings but reshown at every new invocation of dune (untl the source files are fixed), while not inhibiting tests
  • having no upwards exploration of the source tree by default (once again, we have several students with errors every year because of a missing dune-workspace)
  • I don’t know if much can be done to improve the situation but fresh invocations of dune utop are slow, even for a simplistic project, apparently due to the linking phase
  • auto-formatting (in VS Code at least, by far the most used editor among students) doesn’t work as long as an .ocamlformat file (even empty) isn’t present
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