-- Re: -- Cabal-1.2 and Haddock behaviour

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sat, 2007-11-10 at 19:46 +0100, Andrea Rossato wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 09, 2007 at 06:58:58PM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> > Please don't give up on packaging for Slackware, packaging is so
> > important. I'm sorry that stuff changes. There are usually good reasons
> > for these changes but I do accept that we need to consider transitions
> > more and document changes.
> 
> No, I will not give up...

Great, I'm glad to hear it. :-)

>  And I also understand that the change was no
> arbitrary, but done in order to comply with the standard way of
> dealing with documentation in the linux file system.

Yes. The default was wrong and different distro want to put them in
different places anyway so it has to be configurable.

> And indeed my
> build scripts result now simpler than before. Still, due to some
> issues with ghc docs generation, I found out about this problem after
> a couple of days spent in dealing with ghc, and only after all the
> creation of the build scripts for the last library split had been
> done... That can be frustrating, believe me: writing shell scripts is
> not what I like most!

Yes, we've been having similar issues with doc generation in ghc-6.8.1.
There are several bugs open about it. They're not going into a versioned
ghc doc directory by default and the inter-package links are not getting
created. We hope this will be fixed in 6.8.2.

> I hope tomorrow I'll be able to find the time to write a small
> announcement for the haskell-cafe ML, but the Slackware packages are
> now available here: 
> http://gorgias.mine.nu/slack/haskell/
> 
> At the present time ghc and ghc-extralibs are available. More will be
> added later (as soon as compilable with the new tool chain). The
> documentation is decent I would say. 

Great.

> Every package also install a hoogle database.

Oh that's a good idea. We should do that in gentoo too.

> Those databases are collected together in /var/spool/hoogle/hoogle. 
> 
> I have this alias my .bashrc: 
> alias hoogle="hoogle -l /var/spool/hoogle/hoogle"
> 
> For every package there is a corresponding build (shell) script. These
> scrips are collected in a darcs repository available here:
> http://gorgias.mine.nu/repos/haskell-SlackBuild/
> 
> (I'm thinking about writing a small haskell application to manage a
> direct interaction between slackware and hackage, with an automated
> SlackBuild script generation, which is probably going to be less
> resource consuming in the long run, and more enjoyable in the short
> one ;)

Yes, that's what we do for Gentoo. We have a program that generates
ebuild scripts directly from the hackage index. We've got about 150
hackage packages via this route. You might like to look into adapting
our code:
darcs get --partial http://haskell.org/~gentoo/hackport/

It's not been fully updated to deal with the new features in Cabal-1.2
yet.

> Finally, OpenLA and ALUT are not present since the relative libraries
> are missing from a standard Slackware install. ObjectIO is not present
> too. X11 has been updated to 1.3.0 since I will be releasing
> xmobar-0.8 (a status bar for XMonad), and it requires that version
> with the X11-extras merge.

Sounds sensible.

> Sorry for writing more to express my frustration than for a real need.
> Anyhow, when I said you did a great job I was not ironic or kidding. I
> really think it.

No problem. Sorry for the upheavals.

Duncan