Roland Senn
I switched to Hadrian. Normally I hack somewhere in the compiler. So I use "hadrian/build.sh --flavour=devel2 --freeze1" to quickly rebuild GHC after some little changes to the code.
It normally builds - library 'ghc' (Stage1, way v) - program 'ghctags' (Stage1) - program 'ghc-bin' (Stage1) - program 'haddock' (Stage1)
In the case of ghctags I wonder if we shouldn't just remove it. I don't know anyone who actually still uses it and there are better options at this point (e.g. I personally use hasktags when working in GHC).
When hacking GHC, I never use ghctags or haddock. Building ghctags is very fast, 1-2 seconds. However building haddock takes 15 to 20 seconds.
Regarding haddock, I think Alp hit the nail on the head. The right thing to do is just to be more specific about what you want built. Tobias, can you make Alp's advice makes it into the new developer documentation? Also, we should likely describe a workflow for generating tags for a GHC tree. I have a script using hasktags [1] which makes this relatively painless. Cheers, - Ben [1] https://github.com/bgamari/ghc-utils/blob/master/make-ghc-tags.sh