using haddock markup in Description field

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2008-02-29 at 20:03 +0100, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> I like to use Haddock markup like bird track (>) and enumerations (*) in 
> the Description field of a package. 

Yep,

> However I can't get it working, the mentioned markup is simply ignored.

Hmm, works for me:

Description:
        foo
        .
        > bar
        .
        * baz

And the generated html documentation displays the markup as expected.

For some reason we decided on a .cabal file format where blank lines are
ignored and one needs '.' on a line to signal a blank line. I'm highly
tempted to change that unless someone has a compelling reason.

> The content of the description field must be indented, is it
> unindented before passing to Haddock?

When the .cabal file is parsed the indenting is removed from the
free-form fields. The description is written out to a temp file and
passed to haddock as --prologue=${tmpfile}.

Duncan