Documentation building client for cabal-install

[Duncan Coutts]

On Wed, 2011-09-28 at 22:26 +0100, Max Bolingbroke wrote:
> Hi Hackagers,
> 
> I've written a rough-and-ready documentation building service for the
> Hackage 2.0 effort. It is functional enough to submit build reports
> and build documentation for a few example packages on my local Hackage
> instance.
> 
> Duncan: please review+commit! I also had to make some small changes to
> cabal-install that should go into the Cabal repo.

Ok, all committed now except for one of the cabal-install patches. I did
some rebasing of some patches, so you'll want to blow away versions of
the patches you sent me, and pull from upstream. You can check first by
doing a darcs push --dry-run. Blow away anything local that looks
suspicious.

Despite your efforts, the mirroring client still doesn't share much
infrastructure with the build bot client. In the last few days I've
changed all the http get/put/post and http error handling code in the
mirror client to make it robust to various kinds of errors. I'm sure
that much of it can be shared though.

I've not yet applied the cabal-install patch that makes the haddock
options available via cabal install. I'm not sure about making them
available directly as install commands since it's not clear from context
what e.g. cabal install --css means, plus we're likely to get name
clashes. I'll have a think about alternative approaches.

Alternatively, could the build bot just run each phase separately? As in
cabal install --only-dependencies; cabal configure; cabal build; cabal
haddock; cabal-install --only

Solving the install/haddock command line UI issue would be good, but
perhaps we don't have to right now...  Or maybe it's better to be forced
to find a solution now. :-)

Anyway, all good progress. And I've been talking to people about
potential public hosting for a testing server.

Duncan