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Building the documentation

Haddock documentation

The GHC build includes Haddock, and the Haddock documentation for libraries is built and installed by default.

You can disable Haddock documentation for your build by adding

HADDOCK_DOCS = NO

to your mk/build.mk.

It is also possible to process the libraries sources using HsColour, and for the Haddock documentation to include links to the HsColoured source code; in order to do this, just install HsColour and re-run ./configure. The configure script will tell you whether it found HsColour at the end.

To build the Haddock docs for a given library, do this:

cd libraries/base
make html

User's Guide

In order to process the documentation into HTML or printable formats, you need appropriate tools installed. The configure script searches for the appropriate tools, and will tell you whether it found any.

To install the tools necessary for building the documentation, see Building/Preparation.

The following make variables control the building of each type of documentation:

BUILD_SPHINX_HTML = YES/NO
BUILD_SPHINX_PS   = YES/NO
BUILD_SPHINX_PDF  = YES/NO

Note: for GHC <= 7.10, use:

BUILD_DOCBOOK_HTML = YES/NO
BUILD_DOCBOOK_PS   = YES/NO
BUILD_DOCBOOK_PDF  = YES/NO

They are set to YES or NO in mk/config.mk by configure, depending on whether the necessary tools were detected on your system. If you install the tools later please run configure again to enable the default settings automatically. You can override the automatic settings in your mk/build.mk file.

To build a document on its own, for example the Users Guide, do this:

cd docs/users_guide
make html

If this command fails, see the diagnostics section below. substitute 'html' for 'pdf' or 'ps' to build other types of documentation. Note that this will still build the whole compiler if you have not already built it as some pages of the documentation are automatically generated.

After building you can find the html users' guide in docs/users_guide/build-html.

See also Commentary/UserManual.

Installing documentation

Documentation is installed by default by 'make install'.

Diagnostics

If you see an error like this make[1]: *** No rule to make target 'html'. Stop.:

  • Documentation targets are most likely disabled in one of the build config files
  • Use make show VALUE=BUILD_SPHINX_HTML to check if the target is enabled.

Target disabled by configuration

Check for the values of documentation build variables (e.g. BUILD_SPHINX_HTML) in:

  • mk/flavours/<flavour>.mk. Most custom build flavors disable documentation targets.
  • mk/config.mk (configure may have disabled the doc build in config.mk because required tools were not detected)

Target disabled because tools not available

  • If sphinx-build tool is not installed on your machine the HTML docs will be disabled in config.mk
  • If xelatex is not installed on your machine PDF docs will be disabled in config.mk
  • If you install these tools later do not forget to run configure again