[Haskell-cafe] A new cabal odissey: cabal-1.8 breaking its own
neck by updating its dependencies
Jason Dagit
dagit at codersbase.com
Sat Sep 11 15:17:27 EDT 2010
On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Thomas DuBuisson
<thomas.dubuisson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> - is there a "specification" of which are the "core" packages?
>
> Are there packages on which the community standardizes? That's the
> goal of Haskell-Platform [1], but I don't place any special value in a
> package being in HP yet - I just work with whatever package on Hackage
> fills my need and am under the impression this is most peoples mode of
> operation.
>From the FAQ linked by Paolo:
http://www.haskell.org/cabal/FAQ.html#dependencies-conflict
"To avoid this problem in the future, avoid upgrading core packages.
The latest version of cabal-install has disabled the upgrade command
to make it a bit harder for people to break their systems in this
way."
I think that's what Paolo meant by "core" package. Sadly the FAQ
doesn't say what core means. Nor is that page user editable. I think
"core" here must refer to packages that ghc is linked to. For
example, the process package in the example on the FAQ.
I actually had this problem last weekend and I make a habit of never
running 'cabal upgrade' and never installing things globally. Yet
some how on my system a package that ghc was built with did get
upgraded and installed in my user package db. It was causing various
things to fail to configure. If I recall correctly it was the
directory package, but I'll use FOO as a place holder. I used the
suggested command line:
ghc-pkg unregister --user FOO-X
ghc-pkg said it was ignoring the command because it would break
packages. So then I tried adding --force. At that point, ghc-pkg
still said it was ignoring me and that I should use --force. This was
on ghc-6.12.1. I tried it one more time with the --force option then
ran ghc-pkg list FOO, and all instances of the FOO package were gone.
At that point I could no longer configure any packages needing FOO.
In the end I had to reinstall ghc so I took it as a chance to upgrade
to 6.12.3.
Jason
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