On 05/01/14 14:14, Sven Panne wrote:
My ALUT package is among the ones without documentation, and I have a theory what's wrong (probably a missing installed C library/package libalut-dev, see https://github.com/haskell-openal/ALUT/blob/master/.travis.yml). Two questions:
* As a package maintainer, how can I find out why the documentation is not built/published on Hackage? Logs, etc.?
I mention a link to a GitHub post in my opening post which outlines how to access the log. In case of ALUT, the build log is at [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/ALUT-2.3.0.1/reports/1/log and indeed a C library is missing.
* Who should be contacted to polish the server a bit (i.e. install libalut-dev)?
No idea, but I'd love to find out myself! I'm just a disgruntled Hackage user myself.
Currently things are very opaque from the outside, both from a technical and from an organizational point of view, and manually uploading documentation which is effectively guaranteed to be wrong/outdated/etc. sooner or later is not a solution IMHO.
You would be uploading documentation for a specific package version. So for example, if you upload something for ALUT 2.3.0.1 and later upload upload ALUT 2.4, either the docs will be built fine (which would be ideal) or you will have to upload them yourself again for that version. I agree that this is subpar but I think it's better than nothing. There should really be a ‘upload documentation’ button on the site or maybe even a Cabal flag or maybe even ability to bundle documentation in the package tarball when uploading it, to act as a fallback if package fails to build. I suppose this is something that has to be discussed. Ideally, it should just work.
Cheers, S.
[1]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/ALUT-2.3.0.1/reports/1/log -- Mateusz K.