[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: Haddock version 2.8.0

[David Waern]

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-- Haddock 2.8.0
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A new version of Haddock, the Haskell documentation tool, is out!

The biggest news this time is that we have a shiny new XHTML backend, created
by Mark Lentczner, which outputs semantically correct XHTML, making it much
easier to create new themes for Haddock.

Mark has made an extraordinary effort by going through and rewriting the old
table based HTML backend, fixing non-standards-compliant quirks, and adding a
bunch of new useful features on top of that. See the changelog for more
details.

Included is a new default CSS theme created by Thomas Schilling, Mark and Johan
Tibell, as well as the classic theme converted to work with the new backend.

Another great new feature is markup support for examples, contributed by Simon
Hengel. The idea is to be able to write examples that function both as
documentation and unit tests.

Last but not least, we now also have a LaTeX backend. It was written by Simon
Marlow and it was used to generate the libraries section of the Haskell 2010
report.

This version is compatible with .haddock files produced by Haddock 2.6.1 and
above, provided that the version of GHC used to build Haddock stays the same.

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-- Changes in version 2.8.0
--------------------------------------------

  * HTML backend completely rewritten to generate semantically rich XHTML
    using the xhtml package.

  * New default CSS based on the color scheme chosen for the new Haskell
    wiki, with a pull-out tab for the synopsis.

  * Theme engine based on CSS files. Themes can be switched from the
    header menu. (New flags --built-in-themes and --theme. The latter
    is an alias for --css which now has extended semantics).

  * Markup support for executable examples/unit-tests. To be used with an
    upcoming version of the DocTest program.

  * Addition of a LaTeX backend.

  * Frames-mode can be enabled from the header menu.

  * Path to source entities can be specified per package, so that source
    links work for cross-package documentation.

  * Support for a second form of enumerated lists (1. 2. etc).

  * Additions and changes to the Haddock API.

  * New flag --no-tmp-comp-dir to tell Haddock to read/write
    compilation files (.o, .hi, etc) to/from GHC's output directory instead of
    to/from a temporary directory.

  * Various bug fixes.

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-- Links
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Homepage:
 http://www.haskell.org/haddock

Hackage page:
 http://hackage.haskell.org/package/haddock-2.8.0

Bugtracker and wiki:
 http://trac.haskell.org/haddock

Mailing list:
 haddock at projects.haskell.org

Code repository:
 http://code.haskell.org/haddock

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-- Contributors
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The following people contributed patches to this release:

 Simon Hengel
 Mark Lentczner
 Ian Lynagh
 Simon Marlow
 Simon Peyton-Jones
 Thomas Schilling
 David Waern

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-- Get Involved
--------------------------------------------

We would be very happy to get more contributors. To get involved, start by
grabbing the code:

 http://code.haskell.org/haddock

Then take a look at the bug and feature tracker for things to work on:

 http://trac.haskell.org/haddock