Broken documentation on Hackage.

[Henning Thielemann]

Am 06.01.2014 11:27, schrieb Malcolm Wallace:

> I think the fundamental problem is that Haddock is now built on top of ghc.  So if a package cannot be built by ghc (for whatever reason, e.g. missing C library dependency), then it cannot be documented either.  This is a good deal less than useful.  A documentation generator ought to do a reasonable job, even if the code it is looking at is technically not-compilable.
>
> At work, we have a stand-alone documentation generator for Haskell, which requires no compiler.  Haddock also was once stand-alone.  I think it might be time to wind the clock backwards and retrieve this desirable property.

I think the clean solution would be a real "GHC as a collection of 
libraries" instead of "GHCi as a library". Then haddock could use the 
GHC parser without its type checker etc. for documentation purposes. The 
haskell-suite might become the project to fill that gap. It might still 
be difficult to generate docs in the presence of module re-exports, type 
class instances, missing type signatures, template haskell etc.