haddock 2 and GHC

[Claus Reinke]

>>>  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. 

Thanks, that is reassuring to know.

>  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.

I've done that on rare occasions when I didn't have any control over
what was on the presentation machine, or when the only unix machines
I could ssh from there didn't have the latest ghc or libraries I needed. So 
I'd have ghc and vim on a usb drive, or on a network drive (where the 
network machine hosting the binaries wouldn't be able to interpret them,
but the presentation PC would;-).

>> 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?

Every time I install a package for another GHC version. Which is

    - often/occasionally, for the latest stable ghc
    - occasionally/often, for a recent ghc head
    - rarely, for earlier ghcs

No problem with haddock 0.9..

So, does this "think of Haddock 2 as a library" mean there'll be no
more binary Haddock releases? Or, what would a Haddock 2 binary
release look like? Obviously, it would need to include libghc, but 
would it also need to include all of ghc/ghc-pkg, so that anyone wanting
to haddock a source depending on other packages can build/install
those packages with haddock's ghc before haddocking the source
of the importing module?

Claus