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

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2008-12-11 at 18:20 +0100, Sean Leather wrote:
> 
>         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.

Sure, but it'd have to be a different cpp flag because the existing one
is used for a different purpose.

>         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.

Don't you mean the other way around? It's not possible to pass extra
options to these tools via the .cabal file and it's only possible via
configure --$prog-options=

> 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.

You'd have to ask Ross about what happens on the build server.

With the new hackage-server design, it will be possible for authors to
upload docs they have generated themselves when the generic doc builder
fails for whatever reason.

Duncan