Plan for v2

[mlms13]

Now that v1 is out the door, it's time to starting thinking about all the changes we might want for a v2. At a high level, the goal of a 2.0 release will be:

• Modernizing the stack
• Picking a preferred path (decoding into a result with a structured error type) and optimizing for that use case

So with those goals in mind, the roadmap:

Build/CI

• Switch to Melange for compilation
• Switch from npm to yarn
• Use Github Actions for CI
• Do way better at caching inside of CI
• Add a CI step to publish to npm

Library features

• Add letops support #127
• Delete all deprecated features #126
• Rethink custom/extensible validations #122
• Make ParseError's string-ification less confusing

Docs/website

• Migrate the website to Docusaurus 2
• Add a CI step to publish the website
• Add odoc comments #128
• Build docs in CI
• Embed odoc documentation in the website

[mlms13]

Progress is happening here: https://github.com/mlms13/bs-decode/tree/v2

I'll try to make pre-releases whenever especially notable changes happen.

[davesnx]

Hey @mlms13, I would like to use bs-decode and saw you wanted to migrate to Melange (and I might propose to push it to opam also)

Is there anything I can do to help?

[mlms13]

Hey @davesnx! I do still want to do all of those things, and there's even a branch going somewhere... It's been a few months since I actively made any progress there, though. This weekend I'll try to figure out how far I made it and see if there was anything in particular that I got stuck on. If so, I may reach out to you for help, either here or on Discord.

[mlms13]

...off the top of my head, I think there were some issues in my dune file that @johnhaley81 ran into (and may have found a solution for?) The dependencies will definitely all need to be bumped to the latest version of Melange, as well. They may currently be pinned to an older hash instead of a real release.

The other issue that I remember running into was general ecosystem versioning. Like, Relude hasn't quite been dune-ified yet (but I think that one was also getting close). And Relude depends on bs-bastet which has dune files but they're fairly old at this point, and not targeting melange.

I saw @Risto-Stevcev archived bastet, and I'd love to have a conversation about unarchiving and helping to maintain it, if that's something that would interest him. Otherwise we could consider a community fork.

Maybe the bigger question is how many of these things actually need to be "solved" in order to get bs-decode working with melange...

[davesnx]

Hey @mlms13,

Whatever makes more sense to you. I wouldn't rush to have a Melange compatible version when there's a lot of features you would like to pack, but packing more than your energy/patience might be an issue. Probably some adjustments make sense, but if the plan is v2 it make sense to contain a little bit of gardening.

One recommendation to unblock you is to vendor bastet for now and later you could rely on a published version of bastet. I have looked into @Risto-Stevcev and looks like he moved repositories in https://github.com/Risto-Stevcev/fossils which we might not look into GH notifications?

Regardless of the GH actions, odoc, documentation, let me know we have solved most of the issues for our repositories.

[Risto-Stevcev]

I haven't been coding in Ocaml for a long time now. I don't have the bandwidth to track how the ecosystem has changed or to maintain bastet anymore, feel free to fork it.