How to teach Hadrian not to build ghctags and haddock

[Tobias Dammers]

On Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 02:22:52PM -0500, Ben Gamari wrote:
> In the case of ghctags I wonder if we shouldn't just remove it. I don't
> know anyone who actually still uses it and there are better options at this
> point (e.g. I personally use hasktags when working in GHC).

Agree; even if there are people still using ghctags, installing and
configuring it separately is the way to go, and I don't see a good
reason to keep it in the GHC distribution - we don't actually need it to
build anything else, do we?

> Regarding haddock, I think Alp hit the nail on the head. The right thing
> to do is just to be more specific about what you want built.
> 
> Tobias, can you make Alp's advice makes it into the new developer
> documentation?

The documentation already advises newcomers to only rebuild GHC itself;
I've updated it to use the symbolic stage2:exe:ghc-bin notation though
instead of the actual filename (_build/stage1/bin/ghc), assuming that
the former will work even when building in a different directory. I've
also added a link to the Hadrian README, which should provide enough
hints to the rest of the Hadrian documentation.

> Also, we should likely describe a workflow for generating tags for a GHC
> tree. I have a script using hasktags [1] which makes this relatively
> painless.

Maybe, but is it really that different from other source trees? The
newcomers document is quite long already, so maybe we should just have a
separate page for a bunch of editor support and other tooling
configuration, and link to that from the newcomers' guide?

-- 
Tobias Dammers - tdammers at gmail.com