ghc-cabal deadlocks

Trying to build an OS X installer is currently deadlocking when

inplace/bin/ghc-cabal install /Users/ian/ghc/6.12-branch/val/dest/Users/ian/ghc/6.12-branch/val/inst/lib/ghc-6.12.0.20090925/ghc-stage2 /Users/ian/ghc/6.12-branch/val/dest/Users/ian/ghc/6.12-branch/val/inst/lib/ghc-6.12.0.20090925/ghc-pkg /Users/ian/ghc/6.12-branch/val/dest/Users/ian/ghc/6.12-branch/val/inst/lib/ghc-6.12.0.20090925 compiler stage2 /Users/ian/ghc/6.12-branch/val/dest /Users/ian/ghc/6.12-branch/val/inst /Users/ian/ghc/6.12-branch/val/inst/lib/ghc-6.12.0.20090925 /Users/ian/ghc/6.12-branch/val/inst/share/doc/ghc/html/libraries

runs:

/Users/ian/ghc/6.12-branch/val/dest/Users/ian/ghc/6.12-branch/val/inst/lib/ghc-6.12.0.20090925/ghc-pkg --global-conf /Users/ian/ghc/6.12-branch/val/dest/Users/ian/ghc/6.12-branch/val/inst/lib/ghc-6.12.0.20090925/package.conf.d --force update - --global

Linking ghc-cabal with -threaded fixes the problem. I believe the problem is that when we are using a DESTDIR we get a large amount of warnings (more than a buffer full) like:

ghc-6.12.0.20090925: file AsmCodeGen.hi is missing (ignoring)

so Cabal's Distribution.Simple.Utils.rawSystemStdin:

      _ <- forkIO $ do _ <- evaluate (length err); return ()
      _ <- forkIO $ do _ <- evaluate (length out); return ()

      -- push all the input
      hPutStr inh input
      hClose inh

      -- wait for the program to terminate
      exitcode <- waitForProcess pid
      unless (exitcode == ExitSuccess) (die err)

deadlocks unless it is compiled with -threaded, as the forked evaluate threads don't get a chance to run.

The simple fix is to link with -threaded, but I'm not sure that we want to assume that -threaded works - especially as it needs to work in the bootstrapping compiler.

Can we eliminate calls to this, and any other problematic, functions?

Trac metadata

Trac field	Value
Version	6.10.4
Type	Bug
TypeOfFailure	OtherFailure
Priority	high
Resolution	Unresolved
Component	Build System
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