[Feature Request]: specify the Chapel edition in Mason.toml?

[lydia-duncan]

Summary of Feature

Description:
The edition used by the Chapel compiler will determine which features are available. If my memory serves, Mason already has a way to care about the Chapel compiler version, and it is likely that a given Mason package may want to rely on features that are only available via an edition. So should Mason have a way to specify that the package relies on a particular edition? How should that interact with a package's compiler version, if both are specified?

Is this issue currently blocking your progress?
No, this was suggested as an idea after a demo on Mason back in August. Just wanted to make sure it was recorded somewhere

[lydia-duncan]

My thinking is "yes, Mason should be able to specify this". If both compiler version information and edition information are specified, that to me indicates a very narrow range of support - I would expect the common case to be specifying only one or the other.

We should also think about whether a range of editions is specified or just a particular one, and how that interacts with the same situation for compiler versions

[jabraham17]

I think yes, Mason should be able to specify this. Note that by default, the chplVersion field can either be "this version and all later" or "all versions between these two versions", see https://chapel-lang.org/docs/main/tools/mason/guide/manifestfile.html#format. I think we should also be able to specify a minimum edition, and maybe a range of editions?

I'll note that today, I've made use of the compopts field to specify --edition=preview, which just infects all compilations with the preview edition. This mostly works, if code doesn't work in the preview edition it just fails to compile, but there could be subtle changes not caught by the compiler. And, it doesn't inform mason's ability to find appropriate dependencies

[lydia-duncan]

Yeah, I agree that a minimum edition and a range of editions are the right way to go (and I'd make sure the implementation was shared between the handling for the Chapel version and the edition, unless you can think of a reason they'd differ?)