dev meeting 20200722

Present at the meeting:

• Sonja Heinze (@pitag-ha)
• Guillaume Petiot (@gpetiot)
• Nathan Rebours (@NathanReb)

Current plan

• We look into easy bug fixes to clean the issue tracker
• Nathan further specifies the dune-release undraft behaviour in #246
• Nathan sets up a github action to enforce changelog updates
• Sonja deprecates delegates
• Guillaume moves forward on the draft workflow PR

Meeting notes

Guillaume worked on cleaning up the management of Github URIs in the codebase. The parsing logic was spread accross and this cleans it up by introducing a module with an abstraction for those URIs. It enforces the use of a github URI in some places and we're suspecting it might have broken some dark corners of dune-release even though we have strong doubts since we relied on parsing them as github URIs at some point anyway. He will be looking into this to make sure we don't break anything by accident. Guillaume also started working on the support of draft releases and opam PRs. The easy part is done, what remains is the undraft part. Nathan will further specify this in the issue as it wasn't very clear what it should do exactly.

Sonja did the 1.4.0 release! With the fresh look of a new dune-release user she identified a few bugs and potential improvements to the tool and opened corresponding issues. In particular there was some inconsistent handling of external command which were using the old and not as good error reporting. There also were issues in her config file and they weren't properly reported as such, we should improve that and point to the new dune-release config command to help users fix this.

Nathan added a changelog update check action he found on the github marketplace a few weeks ago but it seems it's not working so he removed it. He'll look into writing a simple action himself directly into the main.yml. What we need is simple enough that it should work out well. He also found a few bugs in dune-release after reviewing Guillaume's work on Github URIs (bugs unrelated to this particular PR) which he fixed.

The fixing of these bugs further emphasized how much delegates and the Pkg module complicates the maintainance and sometime can be blockers to fixing some bugs/quirks in the main github workflow. We should deprecate them in the next release (since we now provide an alternative as of 1.4.0) and aim at a 2.0.0 release entirely dropping them soon.