[Merlin-discuss] Merlin's configuration

[Sylvain Le Gall]

Hello,

I will be more than happy to help you on the second point to integrate
an external process that can ask directly oasis to generate a
configuration. I can help you on this project and even help you write
the extension.

Regards
Sylvain



2013/11/19 Thomas Refis <thomas.refis at gmail.com>:
> Hi!
>
> There have been some changes recently on merlin's configuration, and
> we're also considering some more heavy changes on the syntax for the
> .merlin file.  We'd like to have people's input on this.
>
>    * * *
>
> First we've added two new "directives": CMT and CMI, these are
> refinements of the "B" directive, which was used to add directories to
> the build path. The need for this is primarily felt at JaneStreet.
>
> At janestreet, there is one big repository including, among others,
> core and async.  Every source directory is also a build directory but
> the cmi for packed modules are afterwards copied to a particular lib/
> directory at the root of this repo.
> You then have two options to set-up your build path in merlin: add
> only lib/, or add every source directory.
> The first option is unsatisfactory since you won't have access to cmt
> files (that implies no fancy source browsing), but the second is also
> problematic.  Indeed there is a lot of module name conflicts, and
> there's no predictable way to tell which one will be choosen. That
> results in the frequent presence of the error message "Module Foo and
> Bar make inconsistent assumptions over interface Baz".
>
> With the new directives, one can now add lib/ to the "CMI" dirs (i.e.
> the buildpath) and every other directory to the "CMT" dirs.
>
> On simpler setups, one can of course still simply use "B".
>
> NB: This is not on the opam package yet, only on the git repository.
> We should however make a new release soon (in the next two weeks I'd
> say).
>
>    * * *
>
> We are considering moving to a more expressive syntax for the .merlin
> files, the goal is to be more precise about which files/directories
> require which packages/compiler flags and which do not.
> There is two different paths we can follow here:
>
>   The first one is to adopt the syntax ocamlbuild uses in its _tags
> file. This should be precise enough to express everything one would
> ever need. Also it has the advantage of being a syntax everyone
> already knows, and one can also imagine that at some point in the
> future, merlin would be able to understand (at least partially) _tags
> files whenever there is no .merlin.
>
>   The second one, a bit more ambitious, consist of finding a way to
> delegate the work to external tools. That is: merlin would call an
> (arbitrary) external process, giving it the path of the file currently
> under edition. And that process would then output merlin's
> configuration.
> That way, people could first have the configuration file in their
> language of choice, or call a tool to generate a configuration from an
> _tags, _oasis, ?, but would also be able to have merlin integrated in
> their build process. For example people using a build system running
> in "daemon" mode (jenga, OMake) could then feed it the path of the
> file being edited, and would then receive a list of the dependencies
> of that file, as well as compiler flags required.
>
> We would like to know if you think either of this approach is useful,
> or interesting... or not.
>
>    * * *
>
> That's about it.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Frederic and Thomas.
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