Discussion about environment variables in libraries

[bruce-ricard]

The README states

PG'OCaml uses environment variables (or in-code parameters, which are [ill advised] (https://hackernoon.com/how-to-use-environment-variables-keep-your-secret-keys-safe-secure-8b1a7877d69c)) to connect to your database both at compile-time and at runtime.

First of all, I agree very much with the desire not to write any credential to a configuration file on disk. I like very much the idea of passing your credentials to your server through environment variables.
Now, I would say that is NOT the job of a library to do that. I don't want my libraries to dictate the way I pass in my configuration. What about name clashing with another library? Some Peter Gray creates a library and makes it configurable through the environment variable PGUSER and we are screwed.

IMHO it is the responsibility of the developer of the "main" to decide how configuration is going to be passed to the libraries. I personally would like to read environment variables and pass them to the pgocaml library.
It also makes the code a lot easier to understand when I can see what is being passed to the library, for debugging purposes. I don't want to have to look at the library's code to understand what value is being used for the password.

My opinions are always loosely held, please feel free to share your thoughts if you disagree.