[Haskell-cafe] hsb2hs preprocessor looking for a maintainer

Thomas Schilling nominolo at googlemail.com
Wed Aug 4 07:34:18 EDT 2010


On 4 August 2010 12:05, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic <ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Max Bolingbroke <batterseapower at hotmail.com> writes:
>
>> On 4 August 2010 11:39, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic <ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Joachim Breitner <mail at joachim-breitner.de> writes:
>>>> the problem is that Template Haskell does not work on all architectures,
>>>> so the Debian people prefer solutions that avoid TH if it is not
>>>> needed.
>>>
>>> Yeah, we've just come across this problem in Gentoo when dealing with
>>> how Haddock behaves when there's TH to be documented in some
>>> architectures :s
>>
>> I didn't know this: is there a corresponding GHC ticket? I can't find
>> one, but I could just have chosen the wrong keywords. It seems like
>> the right thing to do would just be to make TH work properly rather
>> than maintain a special-purpose preprocessor.
>
> Not that I know of; all I know is that Sergei (aka slyfox) disabled
> building documentation (for libraries that come with GHC) on some
> architectures where ghci isn't available because of this.  My
> understanding is that TH uses ghci (or something like it) to evaluate
> the expressions, and that when Haddock started understanding TH it also
> needed to run ghci to build documentation containing TH.

Correct.  It also needs to be able to generate machine code from the
currently compiled package and its dependencies.  This is because ghci
does not support some features, in particular unboxed tuples.
Therefore, to be on the safe side, Haddock has to create (unoptimised)
binary code as well.

I believe the main reason why ghci isn't available on all platforms is
the dynamic linker.  I don't think it would be easy (or even feasible)
to switch to something like 'ld', though.


>
> --
> Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
> Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
> IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com
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