Broken documentation on Hackage.

[Mateusz Kowalczyk]

On 05/01/14 14:14, Sven Panne wrote:
> My ALUT package is among the ones without documentation, and I have a
> theory what's wrong (probably a missing installed C library/package
> libalut-dev, see
> https://github.com/haskell-openal/ALUT/blob/master/.travis.yml). Two
> questions:
> 
>    * As a package maintainer, how can I find out why the documentation
> is not built/published on Hackage? Logs, etc.?

I mention a link to a GitHub post in my opening post which outlines how
to access the log. In case of ALUT, the build log is at [1]
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/ALUT-2.3.0.1/reports/1/log and indeed
a C library is missing.

>    * Who should be contacted to polish the server a bit (i.e. install
> libalut-dev)?

No idea, but I'd love to find out myself! I'm just a disgruntled Hackage
user myself.

> Currently things are very opaque from the outside, both from a
> technical and from an organizational point of view, and manually
> uploading documentation which is effectively guaranteed to be
> wrong/outdated/etc. sooner or later is not a solution IMHO.

You would be uploading documentation for a specific package version. So
for example, if you upload something for ALUT 2.3.0.1 and later upload
upload ALUT 2.4, either the docs will be built fine (which would be
ideal) or you will have to upload them yourself again for that version.
I agree that this is subpar but I think it's better than nothing. There
should really be a ‘upload documentation’ button on the site or maybe
even a Cabal flag or maybe even ability to bundle documentation in the
package tarball when uploading it, to act as a fallback if package fails
to build. I suppose this is something that has to be discussed. Ideally,
it should just work.

> 
> Cheers,
>    S.
> 

[1]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/ALUT-2.3.0.1/reports/1/log
-- 
Mateusz K.