#402: Automatic hoogle database for installed packages ---------------------------------+------------------------------------------ Reporter: Peaker | Owner: dschoepe Type: enhancement | Status: assigned Priority: normal | Milestone: Component: cabal-install tool | Version: 1.2.3.0 Severity: normal | Keywords: Difficulty: normal | Ghcversion: 6.8.3 Platform: | ---------------------------------+------------------------------------------ Comment(by duncan): I applied the other patch about generating hoogle and html output in one go. I've looked at this patch but I think it needs a bit more thought. So, the general idea is to create a binary .hoo file for each package right? Generating a merged binary database would be a separate task, not covered by this patch. There are two issues: 1. The code in the doc step of cabal-install is assuming a certain layout of the build tree by reading and writing files directly in the build tree. This will not work for packages using build-type custom. It would be ok if we were copying into a temporary image dir before doing the real installation. In that case writing extra files into the temporary image dir would be fine. As it is, I think this feature of generating a per- package .hoo db would be better in the build system itself, in the Cabal lib. 2. according to the [http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hoogle#Database_Creation hoogle manual], the .hoo files of dependencies need to be specified as well. Since each .txt can be converted into a .hoo, and the final .hoo is not really useful except as something to use to merge into a db that users will actually use, perhaps it would be better to just generate the .txt files per-package and then generate a big merged one. Alternatively, why generate the .txt files if we could just generate the .hoo files? Is there any point in generating both .txt and .hoo files for each package? More minor comments about the patch. It should use the existing framework for running programs. This would cut down on the code and integrate it properly with the Cabal exception handling and logging stuff. -- Ticket URL: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/402#comment:7 Hackage http://haskell.org/cabal/ Hackage: Cabal and related projects