[Haskell-cafe] cabal mystery (#562?)

[Conor McBride]

Hi

I've just installed cabal-install (just as a user: I am nowhere
near root) on our unix server at work. That went fine.

Clearly, the sensible thing to do next is get hold of an up-to-date
package list. So, I tried

conor at cafe:~$ cabal update
Downloading the latest package list from hackage.haskell.org
cabal: Codec.Compression.Zlib: premature end of compressed stream

Here's the verbose version.

conor at cafe:~$ cabal -v3 update
Downloading the latest package list from hackage.haskell.org
Sending:
GET http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/00-index.tar.gz HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: cabal-install/0.8.2
Host: hackage.haskell.org
proxy uri host: www-cache.strath.ac.uk, port: :8080
Creating new connection to www-cache.strath.ac.uk:8080
Received:
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2010 12:59:17 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) mod_python/3.3.1 Python/2.5.2
Last-Modified: Thu, 28 Oct 2010 12:38:17 GMT
ETag: "1888003-20bb4e-493ac9dbe6040"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 2145102
Content-Type: application/x-tar
Content-Encoding: x-gzip
X-Cache: MISS from rouble-1.cc.strath.ac.uk
X-Cache-Lookup: MISS from rouble-1.cc.strath.ac.uk:8080
Via: 1.1 rouble-1.cc.strath.ac.uk:8080 (squid/2.7.STABLE7)
Connection: close
Downloaded to
/home/s3/conor/.cabal/packages/hackage.haskell.org/00-index.tar.gz
cabal: Codec.Compression.Zlib: premature end of compressed stream

So I poked about a bit, and I see it's a known issue. As a user, I'm
wondering what to do.

Just now,

   wget http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/00-index.tar.gz

is chugging away quite nicely.

Anyhow, is there
   (a) something I can do to avoid this problem? I couldn't quite
         grasp what to do from the TRAC
   (b) some way to persuade cabal to use the file I'm currently
         downloading?

Any tips to keep the gremlins at bay gratefully appreciated.

Thanks

Conor