[nhc-users] hmake 3.09

[Malcolm Wallace]

> I happened to notice a new release of hmake was out - thanks for doing
> this!

Well, it is packaged, and so is cpphs-0.8, but they are not yet
announced properly.  I was hoping to announce refreshed releases of
hmake, cpphs, and nhc98 all at the same time, but unfortunately the
Cygwin build of nhc98 is currently seg-faulting about 50% of the time,
hence only the other two tools have managed to make it out so far.

> However, unfortunately it seems that the patch I sent here:
> http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/nhc-users/2003-September/000099.html
> didn't make it into CVS  :-(    I've attached the patch for 3.09 (it has
> a few other small tweaks I made too).

I must apologise.  I do have a stack of suggestions for improvements
to hmake in my inbox, but have not really had the time to review
or implement them properly.  As a consequence I omitted them all
(except bugfixes) from the new release.  However this overlooked the
fact that your contribution wasn't just an idea, but came with actual
code (and I presume it is pretty well tested too), so it would have
been easy to incorporate.  Sorry.  Once I can get nhc98 out the door,
I'll commit your contribution to CVS.

> In src/hmake/Imports.hs does "stringgap (c:cs)    = stringgap cs"
> deliberately not check isSpace c? Hmm, there's no [] case either.

Is it unreasonable to assume that the Haskell file is syntactically
correct?  I suppose for robustness of hmake, we should at least have
the [] case, but I don't know what the right thing to do is if the
gap contains non-white characters - currently it ignores them, but
it could throw an error.

> There is a docs/hmake/.#index.html.1.30 in the tarball - it looks like
> you have lost the change of hi copyright from 2000 to 2000-2003.

Thanks for the very thorough review!  And thanks too for your work,
not just on packaging haskell tools for debian, but on active feature
improvements too.

Regards,
    Malcolm