Comment author: @xavierleroy

Reclassifying as a feature wish. Proof-of-concept implementation is welcome.

Comment author: @bobzhang

This is useful for correct build, note that it is not just ocamldep, we wish to have no-implicit-include-current-dirs in all tools (ocamlc/ocamlopt/ocamldep etc)
other tickets which will help correct build: #7383
I will send a patch later

May I take this as my first contribution, I am an outreachy applicant and have gone through the CONTRIBUTION.md file.
@Octachron could you please guide me from where I should begin exploring the codebase for this issue.

I think it is a good idea as a first contribution. The logic for ocamldep's argument is defined in driver/makedepend.ml. Then it is a matter of finding when . is added to load_path.

@Octachron,

At Line 116 in driver/makedepend.ml
if dir = "." then truename else Filename.concat dir truename
seems to be the reason of this issue as this loads '.' in load_path making the ocamldep search in current directory, I also looked at the issue #83 mentioned in the top post.

P.s. - I am done with setting up of Ocaml on my system and started looking at the codebase in detail.

This was a reasonable guess, but I think that it is not the right candidate; what this line does it to compute a path of the form dirname/filename, except in the case where dir is the current directory, in which case it uses just filename instead of ./filename.

hi @gasche,

can we add a check in this line which when finds the current directory to be the root directory then it will not add that path to the load path. not sure though

This was a reasonable guess, but I think that it is not the right candidate; what this line does it to compute a path of the form dirname/filename, except in the case where dir is the current directory, in which case it uses just filename instead of ./filename.

Whenever we are calling the add_to_load_path function we are adding the directory without any checks to whether it is root directory or not, maybe we could add the check here. Again not sure,
please help.
Thanks

let add_to_load_path dir =
  try
    let dir = Misc.expand_directory Config.standard_library dir in
    let contents = readdir dir in
    add_to_list load_path (dir, contents)
  with Sys_error msg ->
    Format.fprintf Format.err_formatter "@[Bad -I option: %s@]@." msg;
    Error_occurred.set ()

Your proposal is to have add_to_load_path do an extra check that would not add the current directory to the load path, even if some other place calls add_to_load_path on the current directory (the current behavior, according to this issue). A nicer fix would be to not call add_to_load_path on the current directory at all; this is nicer because it results in simpler code (no call, no extra check to disable the code). This requires finding why/when the current directory gets added to the load path.

@gasche

Line 577: add_to_list first_include_dirs Filename.current_dir_name;

This seems to be the line where we add . to first_include_dirs then in Line 409-413

  List.iter add_to_load_path (
      (!Compenv.last_include_dirs @
       !Clflags.include_dirs @
       !Compenv.first_include_dirs
      ));

we add . to the load_path, could you please guide me if I am understanding something incorrectly here.
Thanks

You are right, the current directory is added at this line. So the next step is to not add the current directory conditionally if a flag is set. Once this is done, you would need to add a new argument to the list of arguments (which is also in driver/makedepend.ml).

Fixed by #9357 .