New contributor questions / onboarding

[MixiMaxiMouse]

Hi everyone,

I’d like to start contributing to Dune and I thought I’d open a discussion I can use to ask beginner questions as I get familiar with the project.

To start with:

• How are issues usually assigned to contributors?
• When I run the test suite locally, I see diffs like this one:

@@ -520,7 +520,7 @@ let%expect_test "create and fix error" =
           ]
         ; [ "message"
           ; [ "Verbatim"
-            ; "The constant 123 has type int but an expression was expected of type\n\
+            ; "This expression has type int but an expression was expected of type\n\
               \  string\n\
                "
             ]

Is this normal, or will it be a problem to submit a contribution later ?

Thanks, and I’m looking forward to contributing!

[Alizter]

How are issues usually assigned to contributors?

We've recently updated our contribution guidelines here: #12440. It hasn't yet been merged. You are free to work on whatever you feel is important. Generally larger changes are best preceded with some discussion giving the rest of the team a heads up and collecting feedback on feasibility etc. Bug fixes are always welcome, but be sure that the issue you are addressing hasn't already been assigned (i.e. no assignee or PR). It's not terrible however to takeover abandoned work that has been left say for longer than a year.

When I run the test suite locally, I see diffs like this one:

How did you setup your development environment? This seems like you may have some out of date dependencies. Have a look at doc/hacking.rst for the latest information on how to set it up. If you are using nix, we have a nix flake that sets up an environment quickly and easily.

[MixiMaxiMouse]

I followed hacking.rst with opam, got OCaml 5.3.0 and dev dependencies installed. Running ./dune.exe runtest gives me a bunch of test failures that are mostly just string formatting differences (same content, different line breaks). Build works fine with ./dune.exe build @check.
Friend on macOS doesn't have these issues( same types of issues but not the same typos ). Is this a known Linux/OCaml 5.3.0 thing, or should I worry about it for development?

here is the test failure outputs :
runtests_output.txt

[Alizter]

If you followed the setup in hacking.rst, then the error messages suggest things haven't been setup correctly. Did you do eval $(opam env) in order to update your shell env with the opam one?

[MixiMaxiMouse]

Yes, I ran eval $(opam env) and double-checked my setup, I still have the tests failures. Here are the outputs of the commands:

opam switch:

#  switch                                             compiler                                           description
→  /home/maxence/Documents/INFO5/LiU/OpenSource/dune  ocaml-base-compiler.5.3.0,ocaml-options-vanilla.1  ocaml-base-compiler = 5.3.0
   default                                            ocaml-base-compiler.5.3.0,ocaml-options-vanilla.1  default

eval $(opam env) then echo $PATH:

/home/maxence/Documents/INFO5/LiU/OpenSource/dune/_opam/bin:/home/maxence/.nvm/versions/node/v22.11.0/bin:/home/maxence/.opam/dune-dev/bin

OCaml and opam:

which ocaml:
/home/maxence/Documents/INFO5/LiU/OpenSource/dune/_opam/bin/ocaml

ocaml --version:
The OCaml toplevel, version 5.3.0


which opam:
/usr/bin/opam

opam --version:
2.4.1

Note: I have a stale /home/maxence/.opam/dune-dev/bin in my PATH from a
previous setup, but the directory doesn't exist so it shouldn't affect anything.

Full logs are attached:
runtests_output2.txt

Am I missing something in the environment setup?