Automatic generation of documentation for HackageDB

[Sascha Böhme]

Hello,

HackageDB [1] now contains automatically generated build logs for some
packages, most of them also have automatically generated Haddock
documentation. This is, for now, the result of my Google Summer of Code
project.

The progress of the project can be followed from [2], the sources and
some statistics can be found at [3]. For now, 104 packages out of 316
can be successfully processed resulting in proper Haddock documentation
and a build log. Processing a packages includes configuring, building,
testing and installing, besides running Haddock. Also, Hoogle entries
are generated, but not used so far. Note that 31 packages of HackageDB
caused errors while building or running Haddock, their build logs are
also available at [1]. Whenever a package cannot be build or Haddock
returns with an error, all packages depending on that one package won't
be processed either.

The autodoc tool to automatically process packages will be run regularly
(daily, every second day) to mirror modifications of HackageDB.

Besides some problems and several missing libraries on the test system
(which I am about to fix), there are open questions from my side:

  How should the generated hoogle entries be used?

  Should build logs of erroneous packages be mailed to the package
  maintainer?
  
  Are there more feature requests?

Concerning the last question, there is already a list of ideas at [4],
but maybe more ideas or requests are now arising.

During the remaining time, I will work on adding a search function to
HackageDB which will allow to find packages based on several different
keys drawn from a package's description. A detailed plan will be given
at [2] later this week. I am open for any requests or ideas on this
subject, as well, of course.

Thanks,
Sascha


[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg-list.html
[2] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/wiki/SoC2007Hackage
[3] http://community.haskell.org/~sboehme/index.html
[4] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/HackageToDo