-- help needed in packaging ghc-6.8.1

[Ian Lynagh]

Hi Andrea,

On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 11:28:53AM +0100, Andrea Rossato wrote:
> 
> 1. the DocBook XSL StyleSheets (probably autoconf related): Slackware
>    installs them in /usr/share/xml/docbook/xsl-stylesheets*, but the

I'll apply your patch to fix this.

> 2. "make html" fails for libraries.[3]

Ah, I see the building guide talks about that; I hadn't realised we were
meant to support it. I'll add various doc targets to the libraries
Makefile.


We just put

XMLDocWays = html

in mk/build.mk and let "make" build the docs for us.

>    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);

That does work, as does putting

HADDOCK_DOCS = YES

in mk/build.mk before running make.

> 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);

That's just a bug, nothing to do with the path changing; filed here:
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/1850

I'll fix it for 6.8.2.

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

If

XMLDocWays := html

is in mk/build.mk then it should get built when you run
"make install-docs". There was a bug that meant that "make" didn't build
it; I'll fix that.

> 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).

I'm not sure I follow. If I install the amd64/Linux bindist then there
are files

    share/doc/ghc/index.html
    share/doc/ghc/libraries/index.html
    share/doc/ghc/libraries/doc-index.html

What are you expecting, but not able, to find?

> 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.

I think everything is documented on the building guide page you link to,
but there are a few bugs.

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

Thanks for reporting the problems you had!


Ian