Heads Up: GHC devs on Macs - GHC’s testsuite crashes spotlight indexer on SL
GHC’s testsuite[1] contains a test ‘encoding001’ (in the I/O library section) that generates files in various unicode encodings including one using UTF-8 with byte order markers, namely ‘encoding001.utf16.utf8_bom’. On Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), this file causes the indexing process of Spotlight to hang. More precisely, the ‘mds’ (meta dataserver) process appears to go into a loop (eating all cycles of one processor core) — it appears to hang in the library ‘libmecap’ trying to parse what it probably believes to be Japanese or Chinese text.
Interestingly, the file command regards the file to be “Unicode text, UTF-32, big-endian”.
[1] http://darcs.haskell.org/testsuite/
