GHC silently turns off dynamic output, should this be an error?

[Christopher Rodrigues]

Hello,

I’ve investigated an issue (#9176) where ghc with --make -dynamic-too
appears to run successfully but doesn’t generate some .dyn_hi files.  The
cause seems to be that GHC silently turns off dynamic-too output when it
finds an inconsistency between the .hi and .dyn_hi interface hashes of an
imported module.  The symptom, for me, is that some cabal packages will
build but fail to install.  The real problem is most likely not in the
failing package, but in an imported module from a package that’s already
installed.

I’m inclined to say that GHC should stop with an error in this situation,
which would produce a visible error when the file fails to compile.
 However, since GHC carefully avoids bailing out, I wonder if I’m missing
something.  Is there a good reason to turn off dynamic-too output instead
of reporting an error?

Additionally, is it ever valid to have a pair of .hi and .dyn_hi files with
different interface hashes?  Or is it invalid data, in the same way that a
corrupted .hi file is invalid data?  I’m inclined to say that it is invalid
data, because -dynamic-too promises to generate two different (static and
dynamic) implementations of the same Haskell code, taking two different
implementations of the same imported Haskell modules as input.  If the
inputs aren’t really two different implementations of the same Haskell
code, you’ve somehow provided invalid input.
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