HP 2015.2.0.0 and GHC 7.10

[Randy Polen]

I am helping Mark with the Haskell Platform, doing the Windows builds (32- and
64-bit).  I want you to be aware of a problem I am encountering, and solicit
suggestions and possible help.
 
In building for HP 2015.2.0.0 on Windows 7, 64-bit (haven't gotten to 32-bit
yet but likely the same problem will occur), I seem to be hitting the 32K limit
for the length of arguments to a process, encountered while cabal is invoking
haddock to build the docs for the OpenGLRaw package.  For HP2014.2.0.0, the
argument list was ~25K (from looking at my old build logs) but now is ~36K,
which exceeds the maximum for CreateProcess (not a limit of the command-line,
but of the OS call itself).
 
Is there a way to build haddock docs for a single package but in multiple
haddock invocations (maybe building a .haddock file for portions, then
combining them, with the goal that the command line is kept short)?  Seems this
would also require a corresponding cabal change, as cabal is the invocator when
this happens.


Barring any existing mechanism, the typical solution to this problem on the
Windows OS is (when possible, of course) to modify the program to accept a
"response file" of command-line arguments.  In this case, we could add an
option to haddock to accept either a complete "response file" (i.e., allowing
*all* options and arguments to come from a file) or just a file containing the
files to process.  Either of these changes to haddock are rather trivial to
write (but adding another option implies more testing, documentation, other
cases to handle, etc.).  Since haddock ships with the ghc release, that's
another wrinkle for this particular release.  The other implication of such a
solution is that cabal would need a change to utilize this change for it to be
effective, checking haddock's version for support of this new haddock-flag, and
either use it if the haddock version supports it, or do it optionally (which
implies a new flag for cabal's haddock sub-command).  This change to cabal is
also rather trivial to implement (this is not to imply insensitivity to the
incurred cost of each line of code, nor to the added burden of user-visible
changes such as a command-line option).


(Less desirable possibilities, mentioned only for completeness: skip the
documentation for OpenGLRaw for this version of the Haskell Platform; split up
the OpenGLRaw package itself in some way.)


Other possible solutions and work-arounds?  Thoughts on either using haddock in
a different way (and the cabal change that would be required to break up the
doc build into multiple steps for a single package)?  Thoughts on the "response
file" solution?


Randy