library sources are no longer available

[Peter Berry]

Binary package hint: ghc6

Bug #182612 removed the ghc6-libsrc package, explaining that ghc6-doc now contains the library sources. However, this is empirically not the case. ghc6-doc contains no source files at all.

[Peter Berry (pwberry)]

To clarify, I mean the library sources are no longer available as documentation. Obviously you can still do apt-get source ghc6, but I don't want the entire GHC sources, only the library.

[StefanPotyra (sistpoty)]

Hi,

erm, well, yes and no.

The plain source files are no longer there, but html versions generated from these (if you look at the html documentation, in the top right you can click to browse the source for each file).

Are you ok, that I mark this bug won't fix? (as you already wrote, you can still apt-get source ghc6 if you want the plain source files).

Cheers,
    Stefan.

[Peter Berry (pwberry)]

Hmm, I guess. I prefer to browse the source code using a text editor rather than a web browser (I'm used to its way of highlighting things, and I prefer a dark background for code). Is there no chance of bringing back the plain source? I see that the -doc package manages to squeeze 115 MB of docs (of which 15 MB is HTMLised sources) into 2.4 MB of package, so another, plain copy of the source shouldn't take too much space?

[StefanPotyra (sistpoty)]

ok, marking as confirmed/wishlist then.

I'll forward this bug to debian (as I'd like to not diverge too much with ghc6 from debian).

[StefanPotyra (sistpoty)]

Proxying from Ian, the debian maintainer:

"Personally I think that the HTMLised sources in the documentation plus
"apt-get source" is enough.

I also don't see why it makes sense to do this for the libraries that
happen to need to come in the ghc6 packages, but not all the other
libraries; e.g. I think the source for mtl is at least as likely to be
wanted as the source for process. But putting a copy of the whole source
package in one of the binary packages feels wrong to me.

Any other opinions?"

P.S.: you can reply right back to the debian bug via mailing to <email address hidden>

Cheers,
    Stefan.

[Iain Lane (laney)]

I'm going to wontfix this bug report, as I don't think this is something that we are going to do. Thanks for taking the time to report the issue, though.