There are two tasks: building the documentation and installing it. As for building, it is surely good to support widely known formats, but I

#283: install command doesn't install dist/doc/users-guide/ ----------------------------------------------+----------------------------- Reporter: Misha Aizatulin | Owner: Type: defect | Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: Component: Cabal library | Version: HEAD Severity: normal | Resolution: Keywords: | Difficulty: very hard (<1 week) Ghcversion: 6.8.2 | Platform: ----------------------------------------------+----------------------------- Comment (by duncan): Replying to [comment:3 guest]: think the developer should always have the option to do something else (say via a hook). It is not possible to anticipate all the possible types of documentation that the developers are going to come up with. Suppose for instance if someone writes an alternative to haddock and uses it to process its own documentation. True. That is possible at the moment. One would have to override the haddock and install hooks.

As to installing the documentation, it seems to be rather easy: just copy the contents of /dist/doc to $docdir. This can be done independently of how the documentation was built. Or am I missing something?

I'm a bit nervous of just installing all the files that happen to be under that directory. I much prefer solutions where we know exactly which files we should be installing. What happens when you get stale files in there due to renaming etc? We end up installing said stale files. In a decent build system I think we should know how to build and re-build every file. In that case we always know what files to install and how to make sure they're up-to-date. -- Ticket URL: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/283#comment:4 Hackage http://haskell.org/cabal/ Hackage: Cabal and related projects