Integration with errors.haskell.org?
errors.haskell.org presently documents error messages and warnings from GHC, starting with version 9.6.1 once it's released. The design, however, is intended to accommodate any Haskell tooling whatsoever. Would GHCUp be interested in integrating with the site?
What it entails:
- Each error or warning is assigned a unique code of the form
[GHCUp-12345]
, where "GHCUp" is a namespace (we can talk about what it would be) and "12345" is a number that's unique in that namespace - These codes are kept consistent over time, even if the text is rephrased.
As I see it, there'd be the following benefits:
- Users have an easier time contributing documentation for how to work around various situations that may arise, so more docs may exist
- Error messages gain a notion of identity that allows them to be rephrased without breaking all docs
- Interactive tools that invoke GHCup, Stack, Cabal and GHC can link to one consistent, predictable location if an error message occurs, and new users don't have to figure out which tool is the source of the error
The costs would likely be:
- A one-time cost to put in the codes and update all tests that refer to the string forms of errors
- An small but real ongoing burden to think about the relationship between messages in older and newer versions to keep the semantics of the codes consistent over time
- Some user-written documentation will be in a location other than the manual
What do you think? Is this interesting?