Strange behaviour while spawning processes

[ranjanan]

Consider the following file (example.jl) that I want to statically compile:

using Distributed
 using Distributions
 Base.@ccallable function julia_main(ARGS::Vector{String})::Cint
 
     @show isdefined(Main, :Distributed)
     @show isdefined(Main, :addprocs)
     function f(a)
         x = Normal(0,1)
         @show typeof(x)
     end
     myaddprocs(2)
     pmap(f, 1:2)
 
     return 0
 end
 function myaddprocs(n)
     println("In myaddprocs")
     @show isdefined(Main, :Distributed)
     @show isdefined(Main, :addprocs)
     @show isdefined(Distributed, :addprocs)
     Distributed.addprocs(n)
     @everywhere Core.eval(Main, :(using Distributions))
 end

Now suppose I do build_executable("example.jl"). When I do ./example, I'll get an error message about it not being able to spawn Julia processes (#84). I found a workaround to this here: #84 (comment). This basically copies over your julia binary file and then changes its rpath. So I followed this fix and got it to work.

However, when I do ]rm Distributions and try running the executable again, I get the following error:

isdefined(Main, :Distributed) = true
isdefined(Main, :addprocs) = true
In myaddprocs
isdefined(Main, :Distributed) = true
isdefined(Main, :addprocs) = false
isdefined(Distributed, :addprocs) = true
fatal: error thrown and no exception handler available.
Base.CompositeException(exceptions=Array{Any, (3,)}[
  Base.CapturedException(ex=Distributed.RemoteException(pid=2, captured=Base.CapturedException(ex=ArgumentError(msg="Package Distributions not found in current path:
- Run `import Pkg; Pkg.add("Distributions")` to install the Distributions package.

This kind of defeats the purpose of static compilation if the package isn't installed on my computer. I don't understand what changed between v0.6 and v1.0 to make this happen.

Here's my versioninfo():

julia> versioninfo()
Julia Version 1.0.2
Commit d789231e99 (2018-11-08 20:11 UTC)
Platform Info:
  OS: macOS (x86_64-apple-darwin14.5.0)
  CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-5257U CPU @ 2.70GHz
  WORD_SIZE: 64
  LIBM: libopenlibm
  LLVM: libLLVM-6.0.0 (ORCJIT, broadwell)

P.S. Secondary issue: It's kind of strange that addprocs went out of scope in a function that wasn't julia_main

[ranjanan]

It turns out that I get this issue on Windows as well