I'm trying to build just the opam-installer binary from the opam repo, because I'd like to have this tool available without having all of opam installed.

So I installed the deps which are required for this specific executable, but not the full set of deps that the rest of opam needs.

But jbuilder complains:

$ jbuilder build src/tools/opam_installer.exe --debug-dependency-path
Error: External library "cudf" not found.
-> required by "src/solver/jbuild (context default)"
Hint: try: jbuilder external-lib-deps --missing src/tools/opam_installer.exe
Dependency path:
    _build/default/src/tools/opam_installer.exe
--> _build/default/src/tools/opam_installer.cmx
--> _build/default/src/tools/.merlin-exists
--> src/tools/.merlin
--> _build/default/src/tools/opam_admin_top.requires.sexp
--> _build/default/src/client/opam_client.requires.sexp
--> _build/default/src/solver/opam_solver.requires.sexp

I've verified that the .merlin generation is what's causing the additional dependency, by doing:

$ touch src/tools/.merlin-exists

..after which the build completes fine. So evidently merlin generation is pulling in additional libraries in the workspace (my guess: it depends on every build target in src/tools, which includes opam-admin which depends on opam-client, etc.).

I'd like to split out an opam-installer package, so for this purpose .merlin files are useless (I'll never point an editor at this workspace, I'm just building it).

Is there some way to disable .merlin file generation? Ideally with a commandline flag or environment variable, since editing a workspace config file is an awkward thing to do from an opam package build command.