GSoC Hoogle: Week 1

I started my Google Summer of Code project on Hoogle at the beginning of this week. In my initial application I promised to make my weekly updates via blog, so here is the first weeks report:

I've only done about half a weeks work on Hoogle this week, because I'm handing in my PhD thesis early next week, and because I'm moving house on Wednesday. I spent 14 hours on Saturday moving furniture, and many more hours than that on my thesis! I should be fully devoted to GSoC by the middle of next week.

Despite all the distractions, I did manage to start work on Hoogle. I created a new project for Hoogle at the community.haskell.org site, and an associated darcs repo at http://code.haskell.org/hoogle. I've done a number of things on Hoogle:

• Improved the developer documentation in some places


• Reorganised the repo, moving away dead files


• Work on command line flags, parsing them etc.


• Added a framework for running regression tests


• Organise the command line/CGI division

I've started work from the front, and am intending to first flesh out an API and command line client, then move on to the web front end. The biggest change from the current implementation of Hoogle will be that there is one shared binary, which will be able to function in a number of modes. These modes will include running as a web server, as a command line version, as an interactive (Hugs/GHCi style) program, documentation location etc. This will allow easier installation, and let everyone host their own web-based Hoogle without much effort.

Next week: I hope to move towards the command line client and central Hoogle database structure. I also hope to chat to the Haddock 2 people, and try and get some integration similar to Haddock 1's --hoogle flag.

User visible changes: Hoogle 4 as it currently stands is unable to run searches, although hoogle --test will run some regression tests.