ocaml / ocaml/dune

Ability to control the meaning of :standard dirs at workspace level.

Open
#3,271 11 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

enhancement good first issue
Dominant language
OCaml
Stars
1.9k
Forks
500
Avg merge
15h 21m
Merged PRs (30d)
277

Description

Currently directories with leading underscores are ignored by dune by default, even in cases when specifying (include_subdirs unqualified). There is a pattern in the JS community with the most popular testing library (Jest), where developers put a directory called __tests__ right next to the code that it tests. That pattern doesn't translate to Dune because it ignores all directories with a leading underscore. There are ways around it, but there are some downsides to those workarounds.

  • Each dune file that has tests has to remember to include __tests__ in its (dirs).
  • (dirs) isn't respected when it is generated using the "include" or Tuareg mode features.

I might suggest it would be better if Dune was not so opinionated to ignore directories starting with underscore, but that's probably a more invasive breaking change.

Instead, could we allow projects to specify at the dune-project or dune-workspace level, the meaning of :standard dirs? For example, you could override the default definition of :standard. Right now standard is a regex [^_\.].*, but this could be overridden so be .* for this Jest style pattern.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by tracing how :standard dirs and the regex [^_.].* are defined and consumed for include_subdirs unqualified, then inspect dune-project and dune-workspace configuration handling. Define the project- or workspace-level override semantics and verify that tests directories are included without per-directory (dirs) entries.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
ocaml
Domain
build-system
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.