This fixes deadlock in asyncFetchPackages:

  withAsync action1 (\_ -> action2)

loses exceptions thrown by action1. If in addition, action2
has a dependency on data produced by action1 (as is the case
here), this will block indefinitely.

(This bug caused some of the new tests to hang, since after
the change to use async-safe try, it became easier for
fetchPackages to throw an exception.)