On Thu, 2009-05-14 at 12:09 +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 10:52:36AM +0100, Alistair Bayley wrote:
I've uploaded Takusen-0.8.5 to hackage... but "cabal install Takusen" still tries to get 0.8.4. Is there a separate database/file for cabal install ...
Yes, and it is stored locally on your machine. You must do cabal update to refresh your local machine cache.
Personally, I would prefer "cabal install" to automatically refresh its own local cache (when appropriate), without this extra step. If cabal is going to reach out over the net to download package sources, it might as well ensure that it collects the latest version of the index first.
I accept that the current behaviour is not perfect but I don't see an obvious perfect solution. The difficulty with this is that we use cabal install for thing we expect to be local. We don't know that we will need to go to the network until we've planned what to do, and that involves having the info already. We also support offline operations, we have cabal fetch for just this reason. I added a check for the package db being very old, and we could make the error message you get when a package is not found mention that you might want to update. The other thing is that sometimes you don't want the package database to be silently updated. You want to stick with a particular snapshot. It's important that network access be fairly clear to users. Duncan