Package base58 has two versions from two different projects

[clecat]

I have an issue when installing the package base58 (already mentioned in this closed issue: #14274)
When I do opam list base58, I get:

# Packages matching: name-match(base58) & (installed | available)
# Package    # Installed # Synopsis
base58.0.1.0 0.1.0       Base58 encoding and decoding
base58.0.1.2 0.1.0       Base58 encoding and decoding

However the two listed versions come from different projects:

• base58.0.1.0 installs this project: https://github.com/mransan/base58
• base58.0.1.2 installs this project: https://github.com/sylvarant/base58

It seems that the first project (0.1.0) is more usable (allows to encode strings while the second one only allows to encode ints and bit ints), sadly, this version being the lowest, it is automatically replaced.

[kit-ty-kate]

cc @mransan @sylvarant

[raphael-proust]

• These projects seem to have no dependencies in the rest of opam.
• The activity is relatively low: the projects seem somewhat stable?

We could rename those packages? We could keep the old names to avoid breaking things?

[haochenx]

Off-topic but an alternative is to use https://github.com/tarides/tezos-base58 but the drawback is that tezos-base58 which depends on zarith that has C stubs.

[haochenx]

My two cents are:

• create aliasing packages with "qualified" name, i.e. to create
  • package base58-mransan as an alias for https://github.com/mransan/base58
  • package base58-sylvarant as an alias for https://github.com/sylvarant/base58
• and add post-messages to packages/base58/*/opam to warn about the situation and persuade users to switch to one of those alias packages