I thought that [1] could be fixed by ensuring that ncurses is available in the
environment (because ghc exports it as a propagateBuildInput), and indeed that
change fixed *some* build failures we've had before. However, the same error
still occurs with other packages, like hledger [2] and Agda [3]. Frankly, I
have no idea why those packages fail and others don't. But clearly the fix was
inadequate, so I'm reverting commit a8076c76.
[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/5616
[2] http://hydra.cryp.to/build/372451/nixlog/1/raw
[2] http://hydra.cryp.to/build/373161/nixlog/1/raw
In this case, we also need to specify compilation flags to mark stacks as
non-executable, otherwise PaX will not allow ghc or binaries built by ghc
to run. This is what gentoo-hardened does as well.
It sucks, I know, but GHC just doesn't compile reliably when built with
some -j<n> option. :-( We have build errors because of apparent race
conditions all over the place on Hydra. This causes so much trouble for
users that it's not worth keeping this option enabled, IMHO.
The change was supposed to trigger a re-build to fix a broken GHC binary
on the Hydra build farm, but now it turns out that the cause for the
errors we're seeing isn't GHC: all kinds of (non-Haskell) packages are
broken.