GHC hacking in Windows -> too much pain

[Ian Lynagh]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 01:12:53PM +0300, Esa Ilari Vuokko wrote:
> 
> Attached few patches that I needed to build head with 6.7 binary
> snapshot installer.

Great, thanks! Will validate along with a couple of others and should
push shortly.

>  * When building with ghc 6.6.1 and make -j2 or higher, I very
>    often get Bad Interface File, magic number mismatch.  In irc,
>    Ian told me this happens randomly on buildbots too.

Right; IIRC Simon M thought that the problem was that each cygwin/mingw
process was allocating 384M at startup, and so when you get a number of
them running at once (2 GHCs each running gcc, which in turn each run
as, say) memory allocation fails (or possibly some other sort of
resource) and we get that error.

If we could find a solution to this then it would be really useful.

We should probably be giving a more correct error message too.

>  * I noticed this with alex, but it's probably true for many other
>    tools;  If there's spaces in path, configure/build will fail
>    miserably.  I can't find any guidelines how this is supposed
>    to be handled in configure/config.mk.in/suffix.mk/other makefiles.
>  * GMP configure/build often triggers for no obvious reason when
>    running make repeatedly.  That's really annoyingly slow.

That's odd. Does it always happen, or only sometimes?

Is this with or without -j2?

Before a time that it happens, what are the timestamps of
stamp.gmp.static and libgmp.a?

I assume you aren't building shared libraries, so these won't exist:
stamp.gmp.shared libgmp-3.dll libgmp.dll.a

>  * If, for some reason, I get a working build configuration, and
>    manage to get validate into testing phase; There's always bugs
>    already, most often some of them randomly triggering.

Can't really comment without specifics. The Windows build did just go
through a rough week, but I think it should be happy again now.

>  * I found out, when building with 6.7, that gmp.h is not installed
>    during build, nor during install.

I'll look into this.


Thanks
Ian