The Coq mailing list

[Thomas Gazagnaire <thomas AT ocamlpro.com>]

Hi,

> Another possibility is to not update a package right away when a knew
> optional dependency is available, but wait for the next "opam
> upgrade".

If you do that in the general case, you will have your system in a 
inconsistent state: if you have a library linking to both A already upgraded 
and B not yet upgraded, and if A uses B, then the OCaml compiler will 
complain (rightfully) at link time.

> And adding a "--ignore <package>" option to the upgrade
> command would be nice as well.

You can do `opam upgrade xxx` to upgrade only the package you are interested 
in. I've opened [1] to add a --ignore option.

[1] https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam/issues/590

> The fact that you don't have a choice when installing a package to
> update all the package that may use it or not, is imho really
> frustrating. I have indeed had to recompile coq a few times as well,
> and the experience gets more annoying every time.

The solution for coq is to declare `labgtk` as an optional build-time 
dependency (eg. simply remove it from the list of optional link-time 
dependency, but let the right option in the configure invocation).

--
Thomas