Emacs doesn't automatically open .ocamlinit in utop

[benbellick]

Summary

Hi! I am trying to use utop-mode in my emacs workflow and am encountering the following issue. I would like to do some basic setup in an .ocamlinit file to make certain facilities available to me every time I start a new utop (e.g. install a printer).

Example

Suppose I have a .ocamlinit file which looks as follows:

open Utop_test__Lib;;
#install_printer pp_a;;

where the first line is just some example module, and the second line is just some example printer being installed (which we will say prints values of type a.
When I start utop from the command line via opam exec -- dune utop . -- -emacs, Utop_test__Lib is indeed opened and pp_a is automatically called when values of type a are created.

However, when I run the (nearly identical) command opam exec -- dune utop . -- -emacs when invoking M-x utop, the .ocamlinit file is not loaded.

Is this the intended behavior? If not, I would be happy to work on it if someone can point me towards where to start :)

[benbellick]

Upon further investigation, I now see that the problem is the command opam exec -- dune utop . -- -emacs is executed from dir in which the currently focused buffer exists. Is there currently some way I can tell utop to default execute from the project root dir?