building only the docs

[Ian Lynagh]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2007 at 07:00:49PM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 2007-12-24 at 12:10 +0000, Ian Lynagh wrote:
> > 
> > Related to this, there'e no way to install only the docs or only the
> > binaries when both are built, as far as I know. This isn't a huge
> > problem, but it ought to be easy to fix and it would be nice to have.

Oh, another thing that would make my life a lot easier is a flag for
whether or not to install the license file.

> > It would have made things slightly simpler for me when building separate
> > -doc and -dev Debian packages for Cabal libraries, and it also would
> > mean we could do the right thing in GHC's "make install-docs".
> 
> cabal install --docs --everything-else
> 
> What would the user interface be? Are there any other categories than
> docs?

OTTOMH, there's a tree of things like:

all
    docs
        haddock-interfaces
        html
    license
    binaries
        library
        executables
            executable=foo
            executable=bar

although we don't necessarily have to be as granular as that.

> Is it additive, subtractive? Can the default be explained in terms
> of the new proposed flags?

As long as docs, license and binaries can be (de)selected individually I
don't really mind.

If you want a concrete suggestion, we could have --foo and --no-foo for
each thing, with the default being --all and the commandline being
processed left-to-right, e.g.

    cabal install --no-haddock-interfaces --docs --no-html

would install

    all (which wouldn't actually contain anything)
    docs (which wouldn't actually contain anything)
    haddock-interfaces
    license
    everything under binaries


Thanks
Ian