Oops, seems I sent to libraries. Let's keep the thread on cabal-devel only as here's where the replies happened. On 06/01/14 10:27, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
On 5 Jan 2014, at 10:15, Mateusz Kowalczyk wrote:
It seems that we are having a rather big issue with Hackage in recent months and I'm sure many of you have noticed: a lot of packages aren't getting their docs built. As far as I can tell, there can be multiple reasonable causes:
* Dependencies fail to build so your package does * Your package fails to build directly * Your package requires non-cabal libraries which aren't installed * Your package requires different version of install libraries
I think the fundamental problem is that Haddock is now built on top of
At work, we have a stand-alone documentation generator for Haskell, which requires no compiler. Haddock also was once stand-alone. I think it might be time to wind the clock backwards and retrieve this desirable
ghc. So if a package cannot be built by ghc (for whatever reason, e.g. missing C library dependency), then it cannot be documented either. This is a good deal less than useful. A documentation generator ought to do a reasonable job, even if the code it is looking at is technically not-compilable. It is because it uses GHC to type check the modules and generate the signatures. I agree that there should be some kind of fall back but it would be a great deal less useful of an output. property. Was Haddock ever stand alone? AFAIK it used to be part of GHC and then David Waern separated it into a separate package. I honestly can't think of how it would ever have been stand-alone (that is not relying on GHC to do part of the work).
Regards,
-- Mateusz K.