Where did the GHC API go?

[Ian Lynagh]

Hi Neil,

On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 06:24:35PM +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> 
> > Yes, this is now
> >
> > http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base-4.2.0.0/Prelude.html#v:filter
> >                                                  ~~~~~~~~~~~~
> >
> > I'd suggest that Hoogle shold probably use its own copy of the docs, so
> > that it stays in sync with them. Also, you probably want to index the
> > set of libraries that come with the Haskell Platform, rather than just
> > those that come with GHC.
> 
> Too late. We had a stable link, I used it, Google used it, blog posts
> were written that linked to it, I've emailed my wife links to it, I've
> put them in Word documents, I've posted them on internal intranets.
> You can't create a link, put content behind it, then move the content
> - it just breaks the whole web.

The .../latest/... URLs have always been unstable, by definition.
Functions might move between modules, modules might appear and
disappear, entire libraries might be added or removed, the format of
internal anchor names might change, etc. I don't think it makes sense
for hoogle to point to them.

We could add redirects base/* -> base-4.2.0.0/* etc now, but we'd have
to keep it up-to-date after each release. We could probably make a small
shell script to do so, so maybe that would be the best plan.

On the other hand, we might be better off just removing the latest/
link. People looking for library docs would be better served by a
Haskell Platform doc page anyway. We'd need to work out what to do with
the links in the GHC docs, though.

> I also think it's a bad idea
> for Hoogle to link off to different documentation from the rest of
> Haskell, it's just not a good idea to fragment the Hoogle universe
> from the rest of the docs.

You could also use e.g. the
    http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.12.1/html/libraries/index.html
docs, which are stable.


Thanks
Ian