Broken documentation on Hackage.

[Mateusz Kowalczyk]

Oops, seems I sent to libraries. Let's keep the thread on cabal-devel
only as here's where the replies happened.

On 06/01/14 10:27, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
>
> On 5 Jan 2014, at 10:15, Mateusz Kowalczyk wrote:
>
>> It seems that we are having a rather big issue with Hackage in recent
>> months and I'm sure many of you have noticed: a lot of packages aren't
>> getting their docs built. As far as I can tell, there can be multiple
>> reasonable causes:
>>
>> * Dependencies fail to build so your package does
>> * Your package fails to build directly
>> * Your package requires non-cabal libraries which aren't installed
>> * Your package requires different version of install libraries
>
> I think the fundamental problem is that Haddock is now built on top of
ghc.  So if a package cannot be built by ghc (for whatever reason, e.g.
missing C library dependency), then it cannot be documented either.
This is a good deal less than useful.  A documentation generator ought
to do a reasonable job, even if the code it is looking at is technically
not-compilable.

It is because it uses GHC to type check the modules and generate the
signatures. I agree that there should be some kind of fall back but it
would be a great deal less useful of an output.

> At work, we have a stand-alone documentation generator for Haskell,
which requires no compiler.  Haddock also was once stand-alone.  I think
it might be time to wind the clock backwards and retrieve this desirable
property.

Was Haddock ever stand alone? AFAIK it used to be part of GHC and then
David Waern separated it into a separate package. I honestly can't think
of how it would ever have been stand-alone (that is not relying on GHC
to do part of the work).

>
> Regards,
-- 
Mateusz K.