[Haskell-cafe] Problem with haddock 2.3.0 (again)

[Sean Leather]

> For haddock-0.x, Cabal cpp's all the modules with -D__HADDOCK__ because
> the old haddock cannot parse all sorts of things.
>
> However for haddock-2.x it is important not to use -D__HADDOCK__ because
> the hacks that people added for haddock-0.x would make haddock-2.x fail.
> For example they'd simply omit entire declarations. While haddock-0.x
> didn't really care and parsed and renamed in a sloppy way, haddoxk-2.x
> is basically ghc and so if the module does not compile then it also
> cannot be processed via haddock-2.x.
>

That's quite a presumption there. I can certainly write a module that
compiles and produces documentation for Haddock but that is different when
compiled into binary form. Even without this particular problem, I can see
that being potentially useful.

The proper solution is to make haddock not fail when it encounters TH
> code or whatever the original problem was. It can ignore it for now, it
> just has to not fail.
>

That's certainly the ideal solution; however, it is not there right now.

I would be happy to work around it if I could, but I can't. As far as I can
tell, I can't pass any flags to Haddock via the Cabal file. I would love to
tell Hackage to run Haddock like so, "cabal haddock
--haddock-option=--optghc=-D__HADDOCK__", but I don't know how.

This adventure has exposed a major problem with Cabal that I have run into
several times. It supports a limited set of external tools (e.g. Haddock,
Alex, Happy, etc.), but it supports them in a limited way. Primarily, it is
not possible to pass options to these tools (at least) through the configure
script.

Also, regarding transparency with Hackage: is it possible to determine
exactly which tools (e.g. Haddock version) are being used on the server? I
would like to see a list on the website of the exact operations that will be
applied to my package once uploaded.

Regards,
Sean
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