[Pkg-haskell-maintainers] Bug#654618: xmobar: FTBFS on many arches, missing library HSrts_thr

[Jose Antonio Ortega Ruiz]

Hi Apollon,

On Tue, Jan 10 2012, Apollon Oikonomopoulos wrote:

> On 00:24 Thu 05 Jan     , peter green wrote:
>> >xmobar FTBFS on many arches, due to missing linking library:
>> >
>> >Linking dist/build/xmobar/xmobar ...
>> >/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lHSrts_thr
>> >
>> >Please look into this.
>> That libary simply doesn't seem to exist on the architectures
>> in question (armel, armhf, mips, mipsel, s390, s390x and sparc)
>> contacting the ghc maintainers to determine if this is a bug in
>> ghc (which provides that libary on amd64) or if there is something
>> that needs to be fixed on the application side.
>> 
>> P.S. i'm just taking a look at armhf build failures here, I don't
>> have anything to do with the package.
>> 
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'm CCing the upstream maintainer as well.
>
> According to ghc6's changelog.Debian, the threaded runtime was disabled for
> all non-x86/amd64 architectures in 6.6 (some 5+ years ago). xmobar didn't
> require a threaded runtime to run as it was using lightweight threads,
> however in upstream commit dbf4ea77 (between 0.13 and 0.14), a single ForkOS
> call to handle the XRandR events was introduced. The ForkOS call spawns real
> OS threads and requires explicit linking against the threaded runtime, which
> is unavailable in most architectures.
>
> José, could this ForkOS call be replaced with a ForkIO call? From what I
> gather from the Control.Concurrent documentation[1], ForkOS is only needed
> when using a foreign call that needs thread-local storage. Any ideas?

On a first look, it looks like we could replace it, yes.  I've contacted
the original author of the XRandR patch for confirmation, and i will
come back to you when i hear back from him.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to thoroughly analyze the problem!

Cheers,
jao
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