GHCi linker should load archives

It looks like the GHCi linker doesn't look for '.a' files, only '.o's, e.g. Linker.lhs line 1107:

     mk_obj_path dir = dir </> (lib <.> "o")

There is no corresponding call to findFile with a "a" suffix.

This is annoying because it prevents you from running programs using the llvm package in GHCi. The llvm package depends on a number of .a files:

ld-options: ...
            -lLLVMCore -lLLVMAlphaInfo -lLLVMSupport -lLLVMSystem
            -L/usr/local/lib
           ...

And:

$ ls /usr/local/lib | grep LLVMCore
libLLVMCore.a

The net result is that we get this error when trying to run a program using llvm in GHCi:

$ runghc BrainF.hs 
BrainF.hs: <command line>: can't load .so/.DLL for: LLVMSystem (dlopen(libLLVMSystem.dylib, 9): image not found)

Another argument for finding some way to co-opt the system linker to do linking for us?

Trac metadata

Trac field	Value
Version	6.12.3
Type	Bug
TypeOfFailure	OtherFailure
Priority	normal
Resolution	Unresolved
Component	GHCi
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