[Haskell-cafe] A cabal odyssey

[Ben Millwood]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 8:27 PM, Andrew Coppin
<andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
> The amusing part is, if you "sudo cabal
> install" so it has permission to put the installed files into place, it then
> uses root's configuration file instead. *sigh* Well anyway, I managed to
> work around that. But... Cabal *still* fails to find Alex or Happy, even
> though they're now in the search path.
>
> Oh, wait. They're in *my* search path. They're not in root's search path.
> [...]

It sounds to me like your life would be a lot easier if you knew about
cabal-install's root-cmd configuration parameter! Open your
.cabal/config file and uncomment and set:

root-cmd: sudo

Now cabal-install will take up root permissions when and only when necessary :)
I only found this out after asking #haskell about similar problems.
Perhaps it should be more prominent somehow.