I fear that one is my fault. This should fix it: https://phabricator.haskell.org/D5426 I did not want to add a large binary file to the repo so instead compress generated the out file during boot. Which used to work well on my box. However make boot also creates the dependency files that guarantee the proper build order. Turns out sometimes we end up trying to build the compress executable before building the dependency file, so the build fails. I've just gave in to storing the output file in the repo now.