The test in question checks that obliterate gives you the "Really obliterate"
prompt when you answer 'a' to a patch.  This test appears to work when you do it
by hand, but somehow darcs's output is cut off if you feed it in automatically
via echo_to_darcs

You can check this by doing
cd tests
DARCS_KEEP_TEMPDIR=1 perl bin/prove obliterate.pl

Ahah... two details:

If I do darcs obliterate | tee /tmp/foo

I get
darcs: getTerminalAttributes: illegal operation (Inappropriate ioctl for device)

And if I compile with --disable-haskeline, the test passes

What is haskeline?  Can we disable it by default?

Haskeline is a sort of Haskell readline:
 http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/haskeline

Its use is only triggered when the library is installed; otherwise, darcs goes
back to what it always did.

Hmm, maybe that doesn't explain the recent buildbot failures then.

You can configure --disable-haskeline if it helps.

It seems to be a bug in haskeline. I'm sending a bug report to the author, with
a test case and a link to this bug.
In the mean time, haskeline should be turned off by default.

ticket submitted to haskeline trac's!
http://trac.haskell.org/haskeline/ticket/31

On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 20:49:41 -0000, Gaëtan Lehmann wrote:
> ticket submitted to haskeline trac's!
> http://trac.haskell.org/haskeline/ticket/31

Thanks!  (I especially like how you cooked up a minimal test case for
the Haskelline folks or maybe just Judah)  

In the meantime, do you think we should disable haskeline by default
i.e. create an --enable-haskeline flag?  If so, maybe you could submit
a patch.

I guess the only people that are affected are
 - people running the test suite (we have --disable-haskeline)
 - people who try to pipe stdout

The following patch updated the status of issue1050 to be resolved:

* Resolve issue1050: Disable haskeline by default. 
We should revisit this when the Haskeline bug in question is fixed.

The bug is now fixed in haskeline. I asked the author when he plan to release
the new haskeline version - if that's not so far, it should be possible to turn
that feature on by default in the next release.