[Haskell-beginners] Cabal install woes

[Daniel Fischer]

On Saturday 12 March 2011 22:53:27, Andres Loeh wrote:
> Hi Tom.
> 
> > Please install `gtk2hs-buildtools` first and check that the install
> > directory is in your PATH (e.g. HOME/.cabal/bin).
> 
> The most likely explanation for your problems seems to be that while
> you have the buildtools installed, you haven't actually added
> $HOME/.cabal/bin to your search path, so it isn't found by cabal.

A common mistake would be to add it in the form

export PATH="~/.cabal/bin:$PATH"

Many (most, I think) shells don't do tilde expansion in quoted strings, so 
you'd have a literal '~' in your PATH. That's no problem if it's passed to 
a shell, but other programmes usually don't do expansion for such strings.

If that's the case here, possible fixes are
- spelling it out
- using $HOME instead of ~
- not quoting

> This
> might also hold for the new version of cabal-install you installed,
> which installs a "cabal" binary to $HOME/.cabal/bin. But if you don't
> have that in your search path, and have another "cabal" binary
> installed in, say /usr/bin, then you'll still run the old version and
> get the message about the newer version again.

Also if the other cabal is in a place before $HOME/.cabal/bin in the PATH.