Comment author: administrator

Dear Norman,

I've tripped over a bug in ocamldep. In the example below, note that
the I.t mentioned in file a.ml comes from the signature B.S. Ocamldep
mistakenly introduces a dependency on i.cmo. This problem is causing
us a small inconvenience in our build process.

Yes, it's a known problem with "include" in Caml or "open" in SML.
I think Matthias Blume (or perhaps Andrew Appel) wrote eloquently
about it. Basically, to circumvent it, ocamldep would need to perform
most of the type-checking of the module language (to determine the
signature of the "included" path), and this would be a mess, both
conceptually and implementation-wise.

The workaround that I use is to make sure that module components of
included things have different names than existing compilation units,
e.g. in your example

: nr@flatcoat 2656 ; cat b.ml
module type S = sig
module I : sig
type t = int
end
end
: nr@flatcoat 2657 ; cat i.ml
type y = string

either rename the I component of B.S, or rename the i.ml file.
Not pretty, I know.

Best,

• Xavier

Comment author: administrator

No reasonable solution to this problem.