Problem with xargs and ar

[Lauri Alanko]

Hello. Just a nasty build bug with 5.02 that I encountered.

When building the prelude library, the individual object files are
turned to an archive with "xargs ar q libHSstd.a". Now, for some reason,
on this system, GNU ar fails at some point during this process. The
standard solaris ar works all right.

Ar is not the issue here. I've probably blundered something with the
installation of gnu ar, or it's buggy, or something.

The problem is that once ar has failed, and the xargs has failed, and
make has halted, an _incomplete_ libHSstd.a has been created. So one can
just run make again, and compilation proceeds, since the libHSstd.a
dependency has been satisfied.

The way to fix this is of course just to build the archive to a
temporary file, and once the xargs has completed successfully, rename it
to libHSstd.a.

Sorry for not being more verbose. I'm too tired from having fought for
days trying to compile ghc with a _working_ ghci on this solaris
machine... it took literally a minute to build hugs. :)


Lauri Alanko
la at iki.fi