[Haskell-beginners] cabal install errors

[Benjamin Edwards]

I think one point bears repeating: cabal is a build system, really. It does
a good enough job of that. It is a *terrible* package manager and using it
as one I think is a classic mistake that the community needs to address.

My two-penneth worth is this:

Use cabal-dev, or hsenv, for *everything* and 99% of your woes will go
away. The the only thing I do when getting haskell up and running is to get
cabal-dev installed and it's dependencies in the cabal per user pkg store
and then cabal-dev sandboxes for everything from then on.
On Aug 14, 2012 11:57 AM, "Carlos J. G. Duarte" <carlos.j.g.duarte at gmail.com>
wrote:

>  On 08/13/12 22:19, Gregory Guthrie wrote:
>
> Thanks, I'll try that, but it looks like it could be a lot of maintenance and manual cleanup!
>
> I haven't knowingly done any manual upgrades of core packages, but I have done "update"s as asked by cabal when it thinks the database is getting old. I have had such pedestrian usage that I would not have expected to have goofed up the database!  :-)
>
> Cabal seems to be more troublesome that other various *package managers* like apt, etc...
>
>
> Please see this:
> http://ivanmiljenovic.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/repeat-after-me-cabal-is-not-a-package-manager/
>
> But yes, cabal or not, I agree that there should be a better system for
> managing haskell packages, like pip, gem or cpan... but that boils down to
> the problem that some has to do it, and people who are able to do it** are
> often too busy for that.
>
> ** and that doesn't include me, as I'm just starting to explore Haskell on
> my spare time.
>
> All in all, cabal suits me even with its idiosyncrasies.
>
>
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