Building GHC 6.12 with GHC 6.12 + alex

[Simon Marlow]

On 31/12/09 18:35, Antoine Latter wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 12:26 PM, Antoine Latter<aslatter at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 9:19 AM, Antoine Latter<aslatter at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> Folks,
>>>
>>> I've run into trouble building GHC 6.12 with alex built from GHC 6.12:
>>>
>>> "/Users/alatter/usr/bin/alex"  -g compiler/parser/Lexer.x -o
>>> compiler/stage1/build/Lexer.hs
>>> alex: compiler/parser/Lexer.x: hGetContents: invalid argument (Illegal
>>> byte sequence)
>>>
>>> however things like:
>>>
>>> ghci>  readFile "compiler/parser/Lexer.x"
>>>
>>> apear to work just fine. Has anyone else seen this? Has anyone else
>>> succeeded in this?
>>>
>>> This is on Mac OS X 10.6, running on Intel Core 2 Duo. I'm trying to
>>> compile a recent pull of the 6.12 branch.
>>>
>>
>> I've progressed to an advanced state of disfunction. I've patched alex
>> src/Main.hs to use the following:
>>
>> #if __GLASGOW_HASKELL__>= 612
>> readFile :: FilePath ->  IO String
>> readFile file = do
>>   h<- openFile file ReadMode
>>   hSetEncoding h utf8
>>   hGetContents h
>> #endif
>>
>> Now, I get the following error on the same file:
>>
>> $ ~/src/alex/dist/build/alex/alex -g compiler/parser/Lexer.x -o compiler/stage1/
>> build/Lexer.hs
>> alex: compiler/stage1/build/Lexer.hs: commitAndReleaseBuffer: invalid
>> argument (Illegal byte sequence)
>>
>
> Further details:
>
> If I patch alex to explicitly set the encoding whenever it reads from
> or writes to a file, all of these problems go away. I'm not really
> sure why alex needs this and nothing else does, but so it goes.
>
> Is there a separate bug tracker for alex, or should this just be a GHC bug?

Thanks for looking into this - yes Alex needs to explicitly use utf8 for 
reading and writing files.  Those of us using a utf-8 locale probably 
wouldn't have noticed the problem, what's your locale set to?

If you can send me the patch, that will save me time figuring it out for 
myself. Alex doesn't have a bug tracker, but you're welcome to use GHC's 
if you want.

Cheers,
	Simon