haddock 2 and GHC

[Simon Marlow]

Claus Reinke wrote:
>>  In fact it'll come with the Haskell Platform, and that's feasible 
>> because I don't think we're planning to make relocatable binary 
>> distributions of the HP.
> 
> Not having relocatable binary distributions would be sad indeed,
> especially as a regression from what we used to have. Being able
> to use ghc from an external drive, or over network connections
> with randomly assigned drive letters, was rather useful for presentations,
> and I believe was also used by lecturers in theatres with fixed PCs.

Oh, you're talking about not just install-time relocation, but run-time 
relocation!

You can use GHC like this on Windows, and you'll still be able to do that. 
  But GHC is unusual in that it doesn't need any registry stuff to run: 
most Windows software needs to be installed on the local machine before it 
can run at all.  I've never seen anyone just mount a remote drive for the 
purposes of running something during a presentation - normally you'd use 
RDP or VNC or something, or on Unix, SSH to the remote machine.

You won't be able to use Haddock from an ad-hoc remote mount, at least not 
without giving it an extra argument or setting an environment variable to 
tell it where to find the package.conf.  Even a dynamically-linked 
ghc-paths won't help here.

>> Yes you need to re-install Haddock if you re-install GHC, but that's 
>> just like any other library (think of Haddock as a library).  I think 
>> it's unlikely that anyone will want to have multiple Haddock 
>> installations, but if they do then they'll just have to manually 
>> rename the Haddock binary after installing it.
> 
> Isn't that just the problem we're talking about? It is not about wanting
> to have multiple Haddock installations. After the switch to Haddock 2, 
> there will _have to be_ one Haddock installation per GHC installation.

Not necessarily - how often do you need to run Haddock against something 
other than the libraries for your most recent installed GHC?

Cheers,
	Simon