[Haskell-cafe] lambdabot hoogle

[Jacek Generowicz]

On 2011 May 25, at 23:20, Brandon Moore wrote:

>> From: Jacek Generowicz Sent: May 25, 2011 2:45 PM
>>
>> I feel a bit guilty about spamming the list with all my stupid  
>> problems: I would
>> prefer to find my own way around, but if I had to dive in and  
>> rummage around the
>> source for every problem that I encounter, I would not get very far.
>
> I'm not particularly interested in lambdabot myself, but this seems  
> like a reasonable
> conversation for this list, and the sort of thing that's nice to  
> have recorded in the
> mailing list archives - and hopefully folded back into appropriate  
> package descriptions
> and wiki pages.

I'm hoping to find some time at the end of this journey to gather  
together what I have learned on the way, and to try to feed some of  
the information back into relevant places. (Any pointers on how to do  
this most productively would be welcome.) But my fear is that by the  
time I am done, I will have used up all my Haskell time for this  
quarter.

> I wonder a few quick greps for error messages in the source code  
> might have turned
> up something useful without too much trouble,

I wonder myself too. From my point of complete ignorance about how the  
packages are put together, and almost complete ignorance about cabal,  
it's difficult to judge when (and for how long) it's worth digging in  
with grep etc.: sometimes it will be a fruitful exercise, and  
sometimes not. Sometimes someone else will understand my problem  
faster than I can type "grep", and sometimes not.

So my tactic is to dig a little, then send out a cry for help, before  
digging further.

> but from skimming messages it seems
> your efforts have been at least as much as can reasonably be  
> expected for installing a
> cabal package without big giant disclaimers.

Thank you for your kind words. I hope that most others find my spam as  
inoffensive as you do.