Aid in function lookup in IDEs

[guest]

Currently haskellmode builds an index of functions based on the docs installed on a system. This means a user has to install all docs for all packages.

HackageDB builds docs for all modules on the site, so it seems silly that I need to install the docs myself.

It would be cool, and probably useful for IDEs if a file was available from HackageDB that contained enough information to build that index, and point to docs on HackageDB. Then people with limited disk space, who are on always-online machines, can enjoy easy function lookup.

Even cooler would be if there was a web API (e.g. XML-RPC server) available that could be used to do the function lookups. For instance passing a function name would return a list of pairs of module name and URL.

[guest]

On second thought, could Hayoo! be used for this?

[guest]

If you open a Hoogle ticket ( http://code.google.com/p/ndmitchell/issues/list) it might get resolved for you. Of course, you'd need to give a reasonably complete spec for what you want.

[claus]

To answer the haskellmode (for Vim) user: there is now support for both Hoogle and Hayoo! lookup, if you prefer that over local documentation.

However, the haskellmode index, currently extracted from local Haddock documentation, provides haskellmode with the information needed for other features as well (adding imports, or qualifiers, insert-mode completion, ..), so a local index will always be needed.

What has been discussed in the past is how such an index could be created once and for all, by cabal, without going via Haddock's doc-index.html or --hoogle output (one should be able to get package/module/type/:info from a plain package installation, even without docs installed, and documentation urls could be added to such an index as and if documentation gets installed).

Relevant tickets/threads:

•  http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/516
•  http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2168
•  http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/1572
•  http://code.google.com/p/ndmitchell/issues/detail?id=79
•  http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2007-March/023150.html
•  http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2007-March/023128.html

In addition to a local index for each installation, easy access to the complete hackage index (as a text file in a stable format) would also be useful.