Explorations on Package Management in Dune

Initially posted on OCaml Discuss

The OCaml Platform team is excited to announce that we have started explorations to add support for package management in Dune.

This joint work led by the Dune, opam and opam-monorepo teams, started a few months ago with discussions on how to address what is one of the most important pain points reported by the community. This is the continuation of the focus we had in 2022 on prototyping new developer workflows and we'll explore new workflows this integration enables throughout 2023. In particular, we've been developing similar workflows with opam-monorepo and we're building on our experience of the past 3 years to explore how to implement these workflows in Dune.

As we want to involve the community as much as possible and start gathering feedback early, we wrote an RFC on GitHub that lays down a high-level overview of the different features.

The project is in the prototyping stage, so the goal of the RFC is to invite feedback and discussion from the community, rather than serve as a definitive spec of package management in Dune. We will be opening separate RFCs for the different parts as we continue our explorations.

If you want to follow our work, you can look at issues and Pull Requests tagged as package-management in Dune. You can also have a look at the dev meeting minutes for Dune and opam.

It's the beginning of quite a big project, with many people involved, so I want to take a moment to acknowledge the contributions of everyone. The initiative is spearheaded by Tarides and the Dune, opam and opam-monorepo development teams are leading the project. We are also grateful for the generous funding provided by Jane Street, whose support is instrumental to continuously improve the OCaml Platform.

Happy coding!