[Haskell-cafe] A new cabal odissey: cabal-1.8 breaking its own neck by updating its dependencies

[Ross Paterson]

On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 12:17:27PM -0700, Jason Dagit wrote:
> 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."

It's not always possible.  In particular, random-1.0.0.2 (shipped with
GHC 6.12.*) depends on the time package, of which more recent versions
have been released.  That can trigger rebuilding of random-1.0.0.2,
and thus haskell98-1.0.1.1.

It might help if the release of random with GHC 7.0 had a tight dependency
on the version of the time package shipped with it.  Maybe all the core
packages need tight dependencies.