opam

Raised as a usability problem by 11 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2015–2025), in 13 threads.

People raised many different problems with opam, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 14 complaints

Package manager is buggy and extremely confusing to use2025-11-24
Package manager is incomprehensible, full of surprising behaviours and buggy2025-11-07
Many packages fail to install and dependencies break, causing segfaults2025-08-13
Pinning system is incomprehensible; installs old branch unexpectedly2025-03-04
Simple install commands unreliably install wrong branch or ignore local edits2023-11-12
Installs and builds break often, costing coworkers lots of time fixing them2023-11-05
Projects older than a few months fail to build because no lock files are used2022-09-27
Calls opam and dune awful for managing dependencies and building OCaml projects2022-07-21
Packages install globally by default, and avoiding that takes a confusing process2020-06-08
Packages get installed globally rather than defined per project, making dependency management hard2019-05-15
Installing tools like Core, utop and ocp_indent means watching the same dependencies rebuild and confusion over switches2017-08-26
Slow, leaves inconsistent state after crashes, and gives false environment warnings2016-04-27
Installing a second package reinstalls all overlapping dependencies, breaking installs with the packaged binary2015-03-21
Reinstalls all overlapping dependencies, including already-installed ones, and then fails2015-03-20