Jérémie Dimino, Mark Shinwell and myself are organizing a "jbuilder design session" during the day of September 9th in Oxford -- this is right after the OCaml Workshop on September 8th.
Jbuilder is a promising new build system that has already been adopted by some OCaml projects and attracted external contributors. Now may be a good time to discuss short- and medium-term design plans for the tool to guide potential contributors and avoid growing pains in the future -- helping it serve the needs of as wide a part of the OCaml ecosystem as possible.
In the morning we plan to have high-level discussion on the current design and what evolutions are important. Ideas coming from other OCaml tools, or developments benefitting jbuilder and some other tools, may also be discussed. The afternoon would be more of a hacking session, along with low-level discussions on the jbuilder codebase structure and indications for specific new features.
An unfortunate aspect of design discussions is that larger attendance does not always improve their quality. While the event is open to all, we would like to ask you to be considerate in deciding to attend in the morning -- in particular, existing experience with an OCaml build tool or a ecosystem-wide tool that interacts with build systems (such as merlin, oasis, odig, topkg...) is preferred. We will do our best to take notes of the discussion and publish a summary or minutes, so that any idea or result is open to everyone. Feel free to come for the hacking in the afternoon.
The event will be held between 9am and 5pm at:
Malmaison Oxford
Oxford Castle
3 New Rd
Oxford OX1 1AY
Maps: Google Maps, OpenStreetMap