Bug#878113: cabal-install hangs after "hGetContents: invalid argument (invalid byte sequence)"

[Ximin Luo]

Package: cabal-install
Version: 1.24.0.2-2
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

| $ /usr/bin/cabal install cabal
| ghc: fd:12: hGetContents: invalid argument (invalid byte sequence)
| ^C
| 130

| $ /usr/bin/cabal install cabal --verbose
| /usr/bin/alex --version
| /usr/bin/gcc -dumpversion
| looking for tool haddock near compiler in /usr/bin
| found haddock in /usr/bin/haddock
| /usr/bin/haddock --version
| /usr/bin/happy --version
| /usr/bin/hpc version
| looking for tool hsc2hs near compiler in /usr/bin
| found hsc2hs in /usr/bin/hsc2hs
| /usr/bin/hsc2hs --version
| /usr/bin/ghc -hide-all-packages -c /tmp/16816927771714636915.c -o /tmp/1957747793424238335.o
| ghc: fd:12: hGetContents: invalid argument (invalid byte sequence)
| ^C
| 130

After some googling, I found [1] and [2], which helped me figure out a work-around:

| $ LC_ALL=en_US.iso88591 /usr/bin/cabal install cabal-install
| Resolving dependencies...
| Downloading Cabal-2.0.0.2...
| Downloading base16-bytestring-0.1.1.6...
| Configuring base16-bytestring-0.1.1.6...
| [..]
| Installed cabal-install-2.0.0.0

Obviously this isn't ideal since the user should be able to see error messages
in their own language.

[1] https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck/issues/324
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=786781

-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'testing-debug'), (500, 'buildd-unstable'), (300, 'unstable'), (100, 'experimental'), (1, 'experimental-debug')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.12.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages cabal-install depends on:
ii  ghc       8.0.2-10
ii  libc6     2.24-17
ii  libffi6   3.2.1-6
ii  libgmp10  2:6.1.2+dfsg-1
ii  zlib1g    1:1.2.8.dfsg-5

cabal-install recommends no packages.

cabal-install suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information