building only the docs

[Duncan Coutts]

Could someone file a feature request please with a sketch of a proposed
user interface.

Duncan

On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 16:49 +0000, Ian Lynagh wrote:
> 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