[Haskell-cafe] hGetContents Illegal byte sequence / ghc-pkg

[Benjamin Edwards]

Hello café,

I have a program that is crashing, and I have no idea why:

module Main
  where

import System.Process (readProcessWithExitCode)


main :: IO ()
main = do _ <- readProcessWithExitCode "ghc-pkg" ["describe", "hoopl"] ""
          putStrLn "Should never get here"

this is using the process package from hackage. The program crashes with

minimal-test: fd:5: hGetContents: invalid argument (invalid byte sequence)
minimal-test: thread blocked indefinitely in an MVar operation

inspecting the source of readProcessWithExitCode yields an obvious
explanation to the MVar problem, but I don't understand why hGetContents is
so offended.

For the lazy it is defined as follows:

readProcessWithExitCode
    :: FilePath                 -- ^ command to run
    -> [String]                 -- ^ any arguments
    -> String                   -- ^ standard input
    -> IO (ExitCode,String,String) -- ^ exitcode, stdout, stderr
readProcessWithExitCode cmd args input = do
    (Just inh, Just outh, Just errh, pid) <-
        createProcess (proc cmd args){ std_in  = CreatePipe,
                                       std_out = CreatePipe,
                                       std_err = CreatePipe }

    outMVar <- newEmptyMVar

    -- fork off a thread to start consuming stdout
    out  <- hGetContents outh
    _ <- forkIO $ C.evaluate (length out) >> putMVar outMVar ()

    -- fork off a thread to start consuming stderr
    err  <- hGetContents errh
    _ <- forkIO $ C.evaluate (length err) >> putMVar outMVar ()

    -- now write and flush any input
    when (not (null input)) $ do hPutStr inh input; hFlush inh
    hClose inh -- done with stdin

    -- wait on the output
    takeMVar outMVar
    takeMVar outMVar
    hClose outh
    hClose errh

    -- wait on the process
    ex <- waitForProcess pid

    return (ex, out, err)

Now having looked at the source of ghc-pkg it is dumping it's output using
putStr and friends, so that should be using my local encoding on the
system, right? and so should hGetContents in my program..?

Now, for the curious: the reason I care is that this problem has
effectively prevented me from using virthualenv. Sadness and woe.
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