troubleshooting problems with opam-monorepo

["Mindy Preston" <mindy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Over the past few months, I have occasionally attempted to build some MirageOS projects but very frequently I encounter some time-consuming or work-halting problem with opam-monorepo, often a problem which seems non-deterministic. I have a few questions:

(1) is this brittle for other people? Perhaps there’s something about the environments where I’ve tried this (arch linux on aarch64, ubuntu and a close cousin on x86_64, recent opam, vanilla compiler) that’s problem-prone?  Is it possible that build steps involving opam-monorepo might cause inconsistent state if interrupted before completing, which is something I do all the time?

(2) what tactics should I be using to troubleshoot problems like no solver solution being found for my package set, or apparently nonsensical constraints being expressed?

(3) I often work on a library and a unikernel that uses it in tandem, so the `scope` argument to package config is essential, but I had to go digging in functoria .mli’s to find it. Is there documentation that I should have read about this? If so, I will go read it and maybe that will enlighten me.

I’ve also tripped over things that are already in issue trackers like ‘mirage clean’ not cleaning out the duniverse directory and the current problem with OCaml 5.3.0 not being usable at all. After looking into the latter problem, I’m worried about the maintenance status of `opam-monorepo` and the `opam-overlays` repository it uses.  The last commits were some time ago for both repositories, and it doesn’t look like there are replies to recent issues and PRs.

On a more anecdotal note, I did at one point encounter a problem with opam-monorepo not knowing what to do with my host’s ‘manjaro’ linux environment. I wasn’t able to figure out how to plumb through the requisite environment info to tell it what to do, nor was I especially fond of the OS, so I ended up replacing it with something that has a more recognizable string. I think “repaving my entire laptop was the easiest way to get it to work” is possibly informing my frustration with this piece of the ecosystem, maybe unfairly.

I would be happy to hear any advice on living in harmony with ‘make depends’.

Thank you,

yomimono