At Tue, 16 May 2006 21:17:51 -0500, John Goerzen wrote:

Interesting idea. However, it is entirely possible for a package to need to provide haskell-*-doc even if the package has no Haddock documentation.

Agreed.

I would rather see a simple call to setup haddock in debian/rules in these cases.

Right -- this is, unfortunately, a bit trickier than I think it ought to be. If you are not generating haddock documentation, then the rules file is very straight-forward -- you use 'dh_install -i' to build the hugs package and 'dh_install -a' to build the ghc and nhc packages. It is nice beacuse there is no need to deal with compiling Setup.hs, invoking './setup configure' with the correct options, etc.

If you want to also compile haddock documentation, it gets a bit trickier. In theory you just add './setup haddock' after the 'dh_install -i' line. Unfortunately, there is a little gothca -- 'dh_install -i' will only compile 'setup' and run './setup configure' if you are building a hugs version of the library. So, if you are producing a ghc only library, then './setup haddock' will fail.

The current work around is to explicitly compile setup and run './setup configure' before running './setup haddock'. But it somehow seems wrong that dh_install already compiles setup and runs configure implicitly, and yet you still have to do it explicitly in some cases.

What do you think?

One option is to create a dh_haddock script that you call explicitly if you want to generate haddock documentation. Another option is a flag that forces dh_haskell to run './setup configure' even if there does not appear to be any work to do?

j.