it is unfortunately true that cabal documentation is very misleading to many, especially the beginners ...
that's why so many of us need to repeat after-an-expert that cabal-is-not-a-package-manager ...

But now take a look at how many times the cabal user guide mentions the term "package" in its documentation, it is very easy to get misled...

Cabal specifies a standard way in which Haskell libraries and applications can be packaged so that it is easy for consumers to use them, or re-package them, regardless of the Haskell implementation or installation platform.
Cabal defines a common interface Ч the Cabal package Ч between package authors, builders and users. There is a library to help package authors implement this interface, and a tool to enable developers, builders and users to work with Cabal packages.

аааааа taken from http://www.haskell.org/cabal/users-guide/

а
cabal should have been called haskell-make or hmake or something alike...

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 5:38 PM, Benjamin Edwards <edwards.benj@gmail.com> wrote:

I think one point bears repeating: cabal is a build system, really. It does a good enough job of that. It is a *terrible* package manager and using it as one I think is a classic mistake that the community needs to address.

My two-penneth worth is this:

Use cabal-dev, or hsenv, for *everything* and 99% of your woes will go away. The the only thing I do when getting haskell up and running is to get cabal-dev installed and it's dependencies in the cabal per user pkg store and then cabal-dev sandboxes for everything from then on.
On Aug 14, 2012 11:57 AM, "Carlos J. G. Duarte" <carlos.j.g.duarte@gmail.com> wrote:
On 08/13/12 22:19, Gregory Guthrie wrote:
Thanks, I'll try that, but it looks like it could be a lot of maintenance and manual cleanup!

I haven't knowingly done any manual upgrades of core packages, but I have done "update"s as asked by cabal when it thinks the database is getting old. I have had such pedestrian usage that I would not have expected to have goofed up the database!  :-)

Cabal seems to be more troublesome that other various package managers like apt, etc...
Please see this: http://ivanmiljenovic.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/repeat-after-me-cabal-is-not-a-package-manager/

But yes, cabal or not, I agree that there should be a better system for managing haskell packages, like pip, gem or cpan... but that boils down to the problem that some has to do it, and people who are able to do it** are often too busy for that.

** and that doesn't include me, as I'm just starting to explore Haskell on my spare time.

All in all, cabal suits me even with its idiosyncrasies.
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