Simon Marlow wrote:
Obviously I think these tickets are important, since I wrote them :-) In terms of priority, I think #1567 is at the top: not having this harms our ability to reorganise and abstract things, it puts an arbitrary barrier between packages. It's possible my perspective is slightly skewed though, since most of the packages that are affected by this are in GHC's core package collection.
still, -reorganization happens in others' packages too, and we want to encourage this! -everyone uses GHC's core packages and complains when the documentation is broken (and unfixable!) :-) but sure, we should find out if other people have higher priorities elsewhere. (cafe citizens and hackers, tell us what you think!)
#1568 is just refactoring, but it's a high priority: we need to get this code out of GHC and back into Haddock. This is important for Haddock's long term future and general maintainability, though it won't have any visible effect on the way Haddock works.
yes, I agree, things will keep being a little unpleasant until we do this. My intuition says that with 2-3 months I should have time to do this refactoring too, but then, I haven't actually spent a week figuring out just how difficult it is :-). Probably needs some refactoring the data-types that GHC emits comments as, and then possibly-more-complicated having Haddock parse and structure the Haddock-syntax within the comments (and as it relates to the actual code!)
The index page really isn't working right now, since we added the search-box functionality it has become unusable for the GHC library docs (small libraries are ok). Thank goodness we have Hoogle and Hayoo. We should really just revert to the old A-Z links, I'm not sure if there's a Haddock ticket for this.
maybe http://trac.haskell.org/haddock/ticket/70 is related?
There's lot of other stuff that could be done. For instance I'd really like someone with some CSS expertise to have another go at Haddock's HTML layout.
I've done some manual HTML/CSS on my own website (W3C validated!)... don't know if it comes anywhere near "expertise" though :-) One random haddock problem I remember bothering me recently is: no "view source" link on each instance in the list of instances for a data-type (so I clicked a nearby "view source" and scrolled to find the instance source, which was in the same module) -Isaac