Thanks for your quick answer. I can and will open issues but I also wanted to talk about this on the public forum. I’d just like to advocate that these issues look, to me at least, like low-hanging fruits for a far better user experience (I’m not claiming they are easy to implement for dune developers): “for simple projects, just throw in a single basic file and get OCaml rolling (build + utop + test + warnings + format (+ possibly publish a package, thanks to the recent developments described above))!”. Notice I’m not asking to change the format (if you mean switching from sexps), just to have one file. @rgrinberg had suggested doing this in dune-project IIRC.
All our students, one day or the other, forget to add a dune-workspace file and run dune. Then, dune explores the filesystem upwards in the hope of finding a dune-workspace above. Then dune tries to build all OCaml files below the root it found. This results in tens of errors because those files aren’t meant to be built together (they can also rely on older package versions or contain failed experiments).
I get that some people seem to like upwards exploration (which I’d tend to see as a global side effect) and there doesn’t seem to be a plan to change this default behavior. BUT if the idea of a single basic configuration file was implemented, then this would also solve this issue for newcomers.