Create a duniverse

[rizo]

I really like the idea of, in addition to having individual repositories for each project managed by ocaml-community, having a centralized workspace for maintainers/contributors to work and build all projects at once – this might speed up development, contribute to consistency across projects and ensure reliability over time.

Duniverse is a tool that does exactly that. See a detailed explanation by @lpw25 of the benefits here.

I suggest we create the ocaml-community/duniverse repository and add a configuration to include all packages we currently have as an experiment.

In addition, our feedback might be helpful to duniverse creators (cc @avsm).

Thoughts/objections?

[anuragsoni]

I like the idea. I think it will be useful for someone maintaining multiple packages across the ocaml-community organization.

Also, while every project would have a (codeowner/maintainer), it shouldn't be just them making sure that the different libraries play nice together. Having a duniverse would make it easier for someone like me who might not maintain a library, but might still want to provide patches for multiple repositories (it could be tooling, compilation failures for new upstream changes etc)

[rizo]

May I ask everyone to vote with 👍 and 👎, please?

[pmetzger]

I'm not sure I understand the idea well enough to have an opinion. Could you expand on the explanation?

[rizo]

@pmetzger I think the linked post by lpw25 explains the goal relatively well. Do you still have any concrete questions?

In general it will make easier to work on changes to multiple project at once ensuring consistency and reliability. Specially so when community packages depend on each other.

I will reiterate that this will not affect in any way the existing individual projects for people who don't wish to use a duniverse.

[XVilka]

Also related: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/creating-ocaml-platform/3971