I happened to notice a new release of hmake was out - thanks for doing this!
Well, it is packaged, and so is cpphs-0.8, but they are not yet announced properly. I was hoping to announce refreshed releases of hmake, cpphs, and nhc98 all at the same time, but unfortunately the Cygwin build of nhc98 is currently seg-faulting about 50% of the time, hence only the other two tools have managed to make it out so far.
However, unfortunately it seems that the patch I sent here: http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/nhc-users/2003-September/000099.html didn't make it into CVS :-( I've attached the patch for 3.09 (it has a few other small tweaks I made too).
I must apologise. I do have a stack of suggestions for improvements to hmake in my inbox, but have not really had the time to review or implement them properly. As a consequence I omitted them all (except bugfixes) from the new release. However this overlooked the fact that your contribution wasn't just an idea, but came with actual code (and I presume it is pretty well tested too), so it would have been easy to incorporate. Sorry. Once I can get nhc98 out the door, I'll commit your contribution to CVS.
In src/hmake/Imports.hs does "stringgap (c:cs) = stringgap cs" deliberately not check isSpace c? Hmm, there's no [] case either.
Is it unreasonable to assume that the Haskell file is syntactically correct? I suppose for robustness of hmake, we should at least have the [] case, but I don't know what the right thing to do is if the gap contains non-white characters - currently it ignores them, but it could throw an error.
There is a docs/hmake/.#index.html.1.30 in the tarball - it looks like you have lost the change of hi copyright from 2000 to 2000-2003.
Thanks for the very thorough review! And thanks too for your work, not just on packaging haskell tools for debian, but on active feature improvements too. Regards, Malcolm