Like, does this take some of the ergonmic inspiration from Bundler? Like does it use a lockfile automatically, run sandboxed to a directory by default, lean towards convention over configuration in the manifest format, etc?
Yes it’s using human-readable lock files (.opam.locked) and sandboxed builds (using dune to build everything in a single workspace under _build). And a single command to update the lock file when new versions of dependencies are available.
Oh nice! Yeah having this stuff enabled by default would be so cool. I've always found switches and the stateful approach in opam to be really confusing and off-putting.
One thing that might be useful to consider is how it looks in a tutorial (targeted at somebody with limited/no understanding of opam). If it looks good there, that could be an encouraging sign!