Quick Hackage question

[Ross Paterson]

On Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 11:04:31AM +0000, Adrian Hey wrote:
> So is that what's going wrong with packages that aren't haddocked?

Often they just haven't been processed yet.  It's not yet a fully
automated process, though that is the aim.  There's an extra delay at
the moment because I'm switching it to the new version of haddock, and
have struck a few glitches that I'll post about shortly.  (COrdering and
AvlTree are fine, though.)

> I guess if some dependencies are missing this might be the case.

At present Cabal has no way to specify a dependency on a foreign
library, so that could cause a build failure, but the docs can still
be generated.  However if a package can't be built, it can't be
installed, and any packages that depend on it cannot be configured,
so no docs for those.

> I'm just trying to find out if lack of haddock is deliberate policy,
> or a problem with hackage, or cabal, or uploaded packages or what, and
> what (if anything) package authors can do to get their packages properly
> documented in hackage.

No deliberate policy, and nothing you should or can do.  The docs will
appear shortly.

> But in 99% of cases people will have checked this before they
> upload, so I don't think this can be what's going wrong.

You'd think people would check this before releasing, but 99% is an
overestimate.