[Haskell-beginners] cabal install

[Brent Yorgey]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 11:54:21AM +0100, Andres Löh wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> > After doing whatever it wants to do, successfully (at least that's what I
> > think the logs say; I didn't notice any error) I update my path to:
> >     export PATH=/home/.../.cabal/bin:$PATH
> >
> > Everything is "OK" now! But I still don't have a cabal-install binary, and
> > this update has been performed only for me (inside my user account)!
> >
> > Shouldn't I have a binary cabal-install to run?
> 
> The binary is called "cabal", not "cabal-install". You should be able
> to check whether the new version is being used by saying "cabal
> --version".
> 
> > How can I update globally? (for all users of the system!)
> 
> By saying something like "sudo cabal install --global
> cabal-install".

Incidentally, it's better to say

  cabal install --root-cmd=sudo --global cabal-install

That way, cabal will only acquire root privileges for the
installation.  It does not need to run as root for the entire
downloading, building, etc. process, and in fact doing so can be bad,
since it pollutes your package cache with files owned by root, leading
to potential permissions problems in the future.

-Brent