Hackage rocks

[ross at soi.city.ac.uk]

Quoting Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk>:
>       * haddock docs not building. This is very common. The most common
>         parse problem is un-escaped / chars. This seems to trip people
>         up a lot. I wonder if we could make haddock's parser grok this
>         better? For example most uses of ' don't cause problems, eg
>         "don't". I wonder if we could have a similar rule for / so that
>         things like "I/O" didn't get recognised as beginning an
>         emphasised section. Perhaps the rule should be that / but be at
>         the beginning or end of a token, so a " / " or a "X/Y" would not
>         count, only "/beginning" or "ends/" of words?

Like Ian, I'm not sure that complicating haddock is the way to go.  It doesn't
seem unreasonable to expect people to test build their packages, including
with haddock, before making a release.

>       * inability to automatically find/generate dependencies on
>         external packages like C libraries. Many packages that use FFI
>         need to link to non-standard C libs and it's not always obvious
>         what packages they need. Of course, specifying external libs is
>         not simple since different platforms often call them different
>         things, but perhaps we could have some non-binding hint fields.
>         Or perhaps we should just try and guess based on the names of
>         the libs that need to be linked to (though that doesn't cover
>         deps on other programs rather than C libs).

This is a hard one, because the packages you need will vary between systems,
e.g. between Debian and Gentoo, let alone Unix vs Windows.  It may be necessary
to have a little extra information for each system.

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