Re: [Haskell-cafe] haddock backends

On 07/01/14 13:10, Roman Cheplyaka wrote:

* Mateusz Kowalczyk [2014-01-07 02:52:12+0000]

...

* This touches on frequently overlooked problem: Haddock targets more than just the HTML back-end. We also have the LaTeX back-end and the Hoogle back-end. This is why we don't allow things like verbatim HTML in the markup, it doesn't make sense for anything but HTML. Admittedly, LaTeX back-end could just generate the maths itself but we then suddenly have to change the ‘verbatim’ block to the ‘LaTeX’ block. It's also unclear how Hoogle back-end would deal with this. Even if we add the ‘LaTeX structure‘ to Haddock, I'm afraid that it might end up with people just writing LaTeX for their documentation which is useless for anyone not using that back-end.

I see no reason why haddock should have a hoogle backend, as opposed to hoogle using the GHC API directly. It's just a hack that exists for historical reasons.

I also don't see why it's there but I don't think we can just remove it. There are bugs reported against it which means that it's being used. It is quite broken. I think a separate application to generate the .hoo files would effectively be replicating Haddock.

Other than that, HTML is the only backend really in use at the moment, I believe.

I have also thought this until we started considering removal of the LaTeX back-end. It turns out that there are people who do use it. In any case, I'm open to the back-end changes/removal/addition discussions but I think it should be done in a separate thread.

Roman

-- Mateusz K.