Howdy y’all 
, Containers 2.7 has just hit the shelves. The S-expression library is now functorized (so it should be compatible with sexplib with minimal effort); CCDeque has received many improvements; more printers were added; and some efforts towards 3.0 have been initiated (deprecating some of the wartiest warts).
Many thanks to @Fardale, @madroach, and @narimiran!
Would it be possible to release containers as a collection of rather independent modules?
So that one could install just the containers’ list, for example.
Sometimes I dream about doing this for batteries, so that
people can install software faster via opam (they don’t compile what they don’t use).
Well containers is relatively quick to install, and the core modules already are independent from one another (if you don’t use them, they shouldn’t be linked in the binary). Having 20 packages wouldn’t make things easier, I think.
OCaml people are spoiled. Try to compile any decent-sized Haskell package and you will never complain about compilation speed of OCaml again.