[Haskell] haddock -cpp ? Cabal support for haddock ?

[Isaac Jones]

(CC'ing libraries)

(snip)
>> > I'd certainly welcome Cabal support for other haddock features as
>> > well (--source, --read-interface).  I am not sure where to put all
>> > these arguments in the .cabal file.
>>
>> Cabal doesn't support these yet, though.  Maybe in the future.
>
> Dear Isaac,
>
> for the next release, I think *every* external program used by Cabal 
> should get a xyz-options (free form) tag to give additional options. We 
> already have them for linker, c-compiler, and hs-compiler, but not yet 
> for preprocessors and doc generators (haddock). This is very easy to 
> implement, does no harm at all, and greatly increases cabal's 
> flexibility as a build tool. (BTW, I can send you a darcs patch if you 
> are too busy at the moment.)

And in the other thread you said:

>> > I made the necessary changes for hsc2hs-options in a few minutes

You added hsc2hs-options to the package description?  Cool.  I'm happy
to get a patch to add options fields to all the preprocessors and
haddock and anything else we may have missed.

There are basically 3 ways that people can customize their packages:
- the .cabal file
- the Setup script with UserHooks
- flags to configure

I was originally thinking of these extra flags as something to pass to
configure, but actually putting them in the description file would be
more consistent with what we have already...

One trick, though, is to make sure that the parser test cases for
cabal still run when you make the changes.  It's all too common for
someone to add a field and break the parser or pretty printer.  The
important thing is that when you parse it, pretty print it, and parse
it again it comes out the same.   Check out tests/ModuleTest.hs

> (BTW, I can send you a darcs patch if you are too busy at the
> moment.)

I like patches whether I'm busy or not.  It'll definitely get done
faster ;)

BTW, I'm tracking this feature request in the Debian bug tracking
system for the haskell-cabal package.

peace,

  isaac