[Haskell-cafe] A cabal odyssey

[Daniel Fischer]

On Thursday 19 August 2010 22:15:59, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>
> It's something I've always _wanted_ Cabal to do, but this is the first
> time I've ever seen it happen. I don't know what particularly I did to
> make this happen, and now it seems to be gone, so...
>

Hm, I just renamed my ~/.cabal/share/doc and installed a new package. cabal 
created a new doc directory and an index linking to a) the docs of the libs 
that came with GHC and b) the new package(s), as expected.
If you have documentation: True in your config, your cabal should do the 
same. Double-check and perhaps file a bug report.

>
> I gathered. Apparently there's no "cabal uninstall" or even merely a
> "cabal unregister" yet... (There must surely be a ticket for that
> already?)
>

Probably. But since so far cabal doesn't track what it installed, it would 
be a major change.

>
> Well, the worst thing that can happen is I get no documentation, which
> isn't exactly a disaster.

No, but a major inconvenience :)

> I'm just wondering how these files got created
> to start with; adding more packages doesn't appear to recreate it. I
> suppose I could try reinstalling all of them...
>

Maybe running cabal haddock on them is enough.

>
> I imagine it's so that each package can be placed in a completely
> arbitrary place in the filesystem, and the links still work.

The links won't work if you move the docs around. That's a bit annoying 
since thus I can't simply rename ~/.cabal/share/doc when I build a new GHC 
and have the docs for the old GHCs libraries working, I have to change the 
links in all the .html files too.

> I'd actually be surprised if these URLs work on Linux either; they don't
> appear to follow the requisit web standards.
>

I'm not an expert, but I think 
<a href="/home/user/.cabal/share/doc/package/html/Module.html">Module</a>
is correct. Anyway, they work.