[Haskell-cafe] Why does Cabal not choose the latest package?

[Jason Dagit]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 3:22 AM, Emil Axelsson <emax at chalmers.se> wrote:

> Hello!
>
> I've had some of the usual problems with packages depending on multiple
> versions of another package. It seems the root of the hole problem was that
> I once attempted to run
>
>  cabal install cabal-install
>
> This brought in a number of older packages (Cabal-1.8.0.6,
> containers-0.3.0.0, directory-1.0.1.2, filepath-1.1.0.4, process-1.0.1.5) to
> my local package DB, which led to inconsistencies when trying to install new
> packages.
>
> However, if I run
>
>  cabal install cabal-install-0.10.2
>
> things work just fine. So the problem is that it wants to install an older
> version of cabal-install. A session demonstrating the problem is found
> below.
>
> Why doesn't cabal always install the latest packages?
>

I consider this a bug but it's actually an intentional feature by the cabal
developers.  I explained it in the past here:
http://osdir.com/ml/haskell-cafe@haskell.org/2010-09/msg00758.html
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