[Haskell-cafe] Re: cabal upgrade

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 08:58:53AM +0100,
 Malcolm Wallace <malcolm.wallace at cs.york.ac.uk> wrote 
 a message of 23 lines which said:

> Indeed, the advice given by each of these tools IIRC was to update
> every time you used it, before doing anything else.  (So why was it
> a manual task then?)

You can put it in cron (Ubuntu does it by default).

> On the other hand, every one of those tools eventually failed for me
> on the update step, leaving me with an inconsistent and non-working
> configuration.

??? If something is wrong in the update step, the installed packages
are not modified. If the database of *available* packages is corrupted
(something I never saw with apt/aptitude or Gentoo's portage), then
you cannot install new packages but existing packages work fine (the
*available* packages database is distinct from the *installed*
packages database).