-- help needed in packaging ghc-6.8.1

[Andrea Rossato]

Hi!

I'm trying to maintain a Haskell tool chain for the Slackware
GNU/Linux distribution,[1] which is lacking any Haskell support.

The problem is that I'm having some issue in getting the documentation
properly built.

I must confess I'm not quite familiar with GNU autoconf so please
pardon me if some of the issues I'm going to describe are not ghc
specific. Still I hope to have your help in solving part of these
problems.

Very schematically:

1. the DocBook XSL StyleSheets (probably autoconf related): Slackware
   installs them in /usr/share/xml/docbook/xsl-stylesheets*, but the
   configuration script is looking in so many different locations but
   that one,[2] which seems to me quite appropriate, actually; I
   solved by making a symbolic link so that
   /usr/share/sgml/docbook/xsl-stylesheets points to the
   /usr/share/xml location, but this is far from being a nice
   solution. I think that /usr/share/xml/docbook/xsl-stylesheets*
   should be tried to, definitely before trying
   /usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/nwalsh/current (why should I
   install a package in a directory named after its author??);

2. "make html" fails for libraries.[3] A work around is to build the
   library documentation with:
   ( cd libraries ; make doc )
   but I'm not so sure this workaround actually works (see below);

3. documentation is now installed in $PREFIX/share/doc/ghc. Previously
   documentation was installed in $PREFIX/share/doc/ghc-$VERSION. I
   don't know if this is the problem, but when build the haddock
   documentation for libraries, I keep getting:
   Warning: The documentation for package [put a name here] is not installed. No links to it will be generated.

   No link is indeed generated, which makes the documentation quite
   useless (in comparison with what it should be, obviously);

4. Cabal user_guide: I cannot build it, no matter what I try. How
   should I do?

5. Indexes and links of the produced documentation are wrong or
   missing (probably because the "make html" target fails?). I
   downloaded the precompiled binaries and I noticed that that
   documentation is lacking links and indexes too. Which makes me
   think this was probably a design decision (a very bad one, I would
   add if I were sure it was actually planned).


Obviously documentation is crucial and if I do not solve these
problems I will not able to distribute the package. Unfortunately I've
already lost quite a lot of time in trying to solve those issues, and
the building guide has not been of any help.[4] The release notes
don't say anything about those changes, which are, as far as I
understand, totally undocumented. Which is quite bad, I would say. But
I could be wrong on that and some documentation may be indeed
available. In this case could you point me there, please?

Thanks for your kind attention and sorry for such a long message.

Regards,
Andrea



[1] http://gorgias.mine.nu/slack/haskell/

[2] This is the searched path:
/usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/nwalsh/current
/usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/nwalsh
/usr/share/sgml/docbook/docbook-xsl-stylesheets* 
/usr/share/sgml/docbook/xsl-stylesheets*
/opt/kde?/share/apps/ksgmltools2/docbook/xsl /usr/share/docbook-xsl
/usr/share/sgml/docbkxsl /usr/local/share/xsl/docbook
/sw/share/xml/xs\ l/docbook-xsl /opt/local/share/xsl/docbook-xsl

[3] this is the error message:
== make html -r;
 in /tmp/ghc-6.8.1/libraries
------------------------------------------------------------------------
make[1]: *** No rule to make target `html'.  Stop.
Failed making html in libraries: 1
make: *** [html] Error 1

[4] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Docs