2011/12/6 Yves Parès
Hi,
I noticed some time ago the fact that qualified imports doesn't affect the generated documentation. It's kind of clumsy in case of libraries that define a lot of synonyms (vector and bytestring come in my mind first). For instance, in the package utf8-string: http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/utf8-string/0.3.7/doc/html/Data-...
Here, the documentation doesn't say that the utf8-string/Data.ByteString.UTF8.ByteString datatype used all along comes in fact from Data.ByteString. If it were instead a new implementation of ByteString (as for bytestring/Data.ByteString.Char8.ByteString) the documentation would look exactly the same, so to disambiguate to reader has to crawl through the code to get to the initial definition. (clicking on a 'ByteString' doesn't even redirect you to the original bytestring/Data.ByteString page)
It should be written that this 'ByteString' is not a newly defined type but instead a re-exportation.
It should be simple to add some kind of "Re-export of <link to original thing>" tag to the Haddock documentation. Feel free to add a ticket for this feature to the issue tracker (trac.haskell.org/haddock) with a description of how it should work.
It's even worse when you see the doc of a module that uses in the meantime lazy and strict ByteStrings, or normal and unboxed/storable/<insert flavour here> vector: you have to hover the type name to see which haddock page it points to.
In that case, a solution might be to indicate on top of the doc page that it uses another module as a qualified import, and to keep the prefixes in the function signatures.
Maybe. But have you tried experimenting with Haddock's --qual flag? David