Standalone optparse or base64 packages?

[timbertson]

I depend on extlib for its OptParse module. I don't actually use the rest, I sort of ended up in this situation by initially using the copy of Optparse in Batteries, but then replacing Batteries with smaller, more focussed dependencies. OptParse was the only thing I couldn't find a good replacement for in opam.

My trouble is, extlib clashes with newish versions of cohttp (and probably other packages) which depend on the base64 package, because both that and extlib define a Base64 module (see my comments in mirage/ocaml-base64#25)

One fix would be to pull out optparse as a separate package. To be honest it seems worthy of its own opam module, but that's presumably a fair bit more maintenance work for you.

It could also possibly be a separate findlib package and still live under the extlib opam package (i.e. extlib.optparse), I think that'd fix the name clash.

A third option is to pull out the problematic optparse.base64 as a sub-package as well / instead, and then nobody would get the clash unless they explicitly use this sub-package. But that would be a breaking change (for build systems, but not ocaml source code).

[ygrek]

yet another option is to exclude base64 from minimal=1 extlib build %)