id,summary,reporter,owner,description,type,status,priority,milestone,component,version,severity,resolution,keywords,cc,difficulty,ghcversion,platform
588,requiring '.' for blank lines is annoying,Jake Wheat,,"The cabal documentation on this page:

http://www.haskell.org/cabal/release/cabal-latest/doc/users-guide/authors.html#pkg-descr

contains this under the documentation for the description property:
'For library packages, this field is used as prologue text by setup haddock  (see the section called “setup haddock”), and thus may contain the same markup as haddock documentation comments.'

But when I try to use e.g. paragraphs in this field, it appears as though the whitespace gets stripped out and so the paragraphs don't appear and all the text gets shoved together.

Example from my cabal file:

Description:         Sql parser, pretty printer and type checker, targets PostGreSQL SQL and PL/pgSQL, uses Parsec and UUAGC.

                     Overview:

                     see the module 'Database.HsSqlPpp.TypeChecking.Ast' for the ast types;

                     'Parser' for converting text to asts;

                     'PrettyPrinter' for converting asts to text;

<snip>

this results in:

Sql parser, pretty printer and type checker, targets PostGreSQL SQL and PL/pgSQL, uses Parsec and UUAGC. Overview: see the module Database.HsSqlPpp.TypeChecking.Ast for the ast types; Parser for converting text to asts; PrettyPrinter for converting asts to text;<snip>

coming out in the haddock docs and on hackagedb - all the newlines are missing. When I copy this text to a separate file an invoke haddock -p, the documentation comes out with the paragraphs correctly, so I'm guessing this is something cabal is doing to the description property before passing it to haddock.

full cabal file here:
http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/hssqlppp/0.0.6/hssqlppp.cabal
scrunched text viewable here:
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hssqlppp",defect,closed,low,,Cabal library,1.6.0.2,minor,duplicate,,,unknown,,