Simon Peyton Jones via ghc-devs
Ben
This sounds like a good decision to me, thanks.
Is there a possibility to have a slow CI-on-windows job (not part of the "this must pass before merging" step), which will slowly, but reliably, fail if the Windows build fails. E.g. does it help to make the build be 100% sequential?
Sadly that won't fix the underlying problem.
Or is there currently no way to build GHC at all on Windows in a way that won't fail? (That would be surprising to me. Until relatively recently I was *only* building on Windows.)
There is no way to build GHC that won't have a chance of failing. Indeed Phyx and I also find it quite surprising how the probability of failure seems to be higher now than in the past. However, we also both agree that the status quo, when it works, works only accidentally (if the win32 API documentation is to be believed). What is especially intriguing is the fact that mingw32 gnu make should also be affected by the same `exec` issue that we are struggling with, does none of the job object headstands that we are doing, and yet *appears* to be quite reliable. Tamar had a hypothesis for why this might be that he will test when he has time. Cheers, - Ben