Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Writing great documentation

On Fri, 2009-11-13 at 23:20 +0200, Max Rabkin wrote:

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 10:58 PM, Simon Michael wrote:

...

A very common problem with online docs is fragmentation.

Absolutely! Is it possible to include non-haddock documentation in a cabal package. Is it possible to have it readable on Hackage?

Not yet. Want to volunteer? http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/330 It's partly a matter of tasteful design and partly implementation. The same person/people do not need to do both bits. Thrashing out a detailed and workable design would get us most of the way there.

I think this would help with the fragmentation and versioning issues.

Yes, I agree.

One option is to have haddock-only modules for non-reference documentation (xmonad-contrib does this), and I think at the moment it is a good option, but it does have disadvantages. It may not be clear from the outline where documentation can be found, and it clutters up the module namespace. Perhaps we could add support for a Documentation-Modules field in cabal files, which would separate these modules in the outline, and not install them but only their documentation.

I rather like the idea of using markdown (pandoc) for separate non-reference docs like man pages, tutorials, user guides etc rather than trying to make haddock do everything. Duncan