Providing custom formatting without importing half of phobos.

[rumbu via Digitalmars-d-learn]

Let's say that I'm a library provider and I intend to offer a 
completely new data type suitable for printing with format() or 
writef().

According to this tutorial 
(http://wiki.dlang.org/Defining_custom_print_format_specifiers), 
to achieve this, one must import at least std.format : FormatSpec.

The problem is that just importing FormatSpec will create exactly 
88 phobos dependencies.

Is there any way to provide formatting capabilities for a custom 
data type without importing the FormatSpec thing?