haddock 2 and GHC

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

I think the only sane choice is to install haddock with ghc.  Some  
people may have multiple GHCs installed, some system-wide and some in  
their home directory.  I think it is generally impossible to guess for  
an installer which version of which ghc to use.

Manuel

Ian Lynagh:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been thinking about haddock 2 and GHC, and it's not clear to me
> what the best way forwards is.
>
> Haddock uses ghc-paths to work out where the GHC libdir is. This  
> should
> work fine for running haddock in the tree, but it won't work for
> installing haddock as our builds are relocatable and ghc-paths bakes  
> the
> paths in.
>
> We could use a shell wrapper around haddock for unix-like systems, and
> add some code to haddock to automatically discover the location for
> Windows. However, this sort of code is fiddly, and a pain to keep
> working.
>
> However, haddock would still have to support ghc-paths for standalone
> builds. Also, I think that in a GHC tree we'd still have to  
> pointlessly
> link against ghc-paths, as I can't see a simple way to avoid it.
>
> Alternatively, we could build haddock and haddock the libraries, but  
> not
> ship haddock with GHC. I think that some people prefer this anyway.
> However, if we do that, people need to make sure that they install a
> version of haddock that is compatible with their .haddock files.
>
> There's also a problem where, at the point we are configuring the
> libraries, we can't tell Cabal where haddock is because we haven't  
> built
> it yet. I think that the best way around this is to add a
> --with-haddock=PATH flag to "Setup haddock".
>
> So currently I'm thinking that the best way is:
> * Build the ghc-paths library when building GHC, but don't install it
> * Build haddock when building GHC, but don't install it
> * Add the above flag to Cabal
> * Advertise as best we can which version of haddock people need to  
> work
>  with a given GHC binary distribution
>
> Any comments?
>
>
> Thanks
> Ian