Hello Karel, When this commit makes it in https://github.com/haskell/cabal/commit/8d59dc9fba584a9fdb810f4d84f7f3ccb089... it will work; but updating Cabal to HEAD is blocking on https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/9583 Cheers, Edward Excerpts from Karel Gardas's message of 2014-09-08 03:21:40 -0400:

Hello,

I've noticed that probably after cabal/ghc-pkg changes done recently HEAD fails to build with HEAD in following way:

[80 of 80] Compiling Main ( utils/ghc-cabal/Main.hs, bootstrapping/Main.o ) Linking utils/ghc-cabal/dist/build/tmp/ghc-cabal ... "touch" utils/ghc-cabal/dist/build/tmp/ghc-cabal "cp" utils/ghc-cabal/dist/build/tmp/ghc-cabal inplace/bin/ghc-cabal "inplace/bin/mkdirhier" compiler/stage1/build//. "rm" -f compiler/stage1/build/Config.hs Creating compiler/stage1/build/Config.hs ... done. "inplace/bin/ghc-cabal" configure libraries/Cabal/Cabal dist-boot "" --with-ghc="/opt/ghc-7.9.20140906-amd64/bin/ghc" --with-ghc-pkg="/opt/ghc-7.9.20140906-amd64/bin/ghc-pkg" --package-db=/export/home/karel/vcs/ghc-src/head/libraries/bootstrapping.conf --disable-library-for-ghci --enable-library-vanilla --disable-library-profiling --disable-shared --with-hscolour="/export/home/karel/.cabal/bin/HsColour" --configure-option=CFLAGS=" -m64 -fno-stack-protector " --configure-option=LDFLAGS=" -m64 " --configure-option=CPPFLAGS=" -m64 " --gcc-options=" -m64 -fno-stack-protector -m64 " --configure-option=--with-gmp-includes="/usr/include/gmp" --configure-option=--with-gmp-libraries="/usr/lib/" --constraint "Cabal == 1.21.1.0" --constraint "hpc == 0.6.0.1" --constraint "binary == 0.7.1.0" --constraint "bin-package-db == 0.0.0.0" --constraint "hoopl == 3.10.0.1" --constraint "transformers == 0.4.1.0" --constraint "terminfo == 0.4.0.0" --with-gcc="/usr/bin/gcc" --configure-option=--with-cc="/usr/bin/gcc" --with-ar="/usr/xpg4/bin/ar" --with-alex="/export/home/karel/.cabal/bin/alex" --with-happy="/export/home/karel/.cabal/bin/happy" Configuring Cabal-1.21.1.0... ghc-cabal: '/opt/ghc-7.9.20140906-amd64/bin/ghc-pkg' exited with an error: ghc-pkg: ghc no longer supports single-file style package databases (/export/home/karel/vcs/ghc-src/head/libraries/bootstrapping.conf) use 'ghc-pkg init' to create the database with the correct format. gmake[1]: *** [libraries/Cabal/Cabal/dist-boot/package-data.mk] Error 1 gmake: *** [all] Error 2

I've been able to solve this by:

$ rm libraries/bootstrapping.conf $ /opt/ghc-7.9.20140906-amd64/bin/ghc-pkg init libraries/bootstrapping.conf

however it's kind of impractical to do that on buildbot (solaris/amd64). Is it possible to fix that somehow?

Thanks! Karel