The importer will not support such a package. As you say, it wants to build them separately because they are separate opam packages. So, either we build them separately too, or we build all at once.

If we build all at once, that's fine. You could name the package ocaml-mirage and not use any #:package argument. Dune will then build all packages from the repository.

One issue with that is that the importer will not know about it and will try to import subpackages again whenever a packages depends on it, instead of using ocaml-mirage.

I don't like the alias solution, though it should work, since the importer would see them.

Le 8 janvier 2023 15:04:35 GMT+01:00, Csepp <raingloom@riseup.net> a écrit :
I'm going through my MirageOS commits for what is hopefully the last
time before I send the patches and I realized that a problem that I
thought was isolated is a lot more widespread than I thought.

As an example look at https://github.com/mirage/mirage/

It defines functoria, functoria-runtime, mirage, and mirage-runtime.

It is possible to build all 4 as one package.

The opam importer seems to not be able to handle situations like this,
since it defines a new package for each sub-package.

How should I proceed?  I definitely want to merge all redundant packages
into one, but then what?  How should the package description reflect
this?  What should the package be named when it corresponds to 4 OPAM
packages at once?

For now I defined a few aliases for cases like this, but I'm not sure if
this is ideal.  They look like this (made up but possible example):
(define ocaml-mirage ocaml-mirage-runtime)