I ran into another oddity due to old build artifacts today -- it was easy to fix, but very confusing; cabal repl was exiting with "unrecognised command: repl".

tl/dr; if you see this, delete the old 'dist' dir and re-run 'cabal configure'.

Here's a snippit of my shell session to explain in more detail:

$ cabal sandbox init
...
 $ cabal --version
cabal-install version 1.18.0
using version 1.18.0 of the Cabal library 
 $ cabal configure
Resolving dependencies...
Configuring pgftransform-0.0.0.1...
 $ cabal repl
unrecognised command: repl (try --help)
 $ cabal --help
...
Commands:
...
  build        Compile all targets or specific targets.
  repl         Open an interpreter session for the given target.
  sandbox      Create/modify/delete a sandbox.
 ...

Note that cabal --version and cabal --help indicated that repl /was/ a valid command.

The issue appears to be that an old dist directory was still hanging around, and (I suspect) the compiled setup.hs build program (which would have been built with an old Cabal) was causing the actual error.  Deleting the dist dir and re-running cabal configure set everything right.

--Rogan


On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 6:18 AM, Yuri de Wit <ydewit@gmail.com> wrote:
It is easy enough to recreate the link manually or as easy to run cabal install again, but that is not the point here. The point is that it will bite the next dozen of unsuspecting users since, at first, they have no idea of what is going on.

In any case, apologies for sending this in this thread as it doesn't seem the right forum to discuss it.


On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 7:53 AM, Paolo Giarrusso <p.giarrusso@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wednesday, September 4, 2013 11:41:33 PM UTC+2, Yuri de Wit wrote:
Thanks for all the hard work!

If you see this in OSX (#1009) while installing cabal 1.18:

Warning: could not create a symlink in /Users/lemao/Library/Haskell/bin for
cabal because the file exists there already but is not managed by cabal. You
can create a symlink for this executable manually if you wish. The executable
file has been installed at
/Users/user/Library/Haskell/ghc-7.6.3/lib/cabal-install-1.18.0/bin/cabal

You will need to manually remove the pre-existing 1.16 links in ~/Library/Haskell/bin before installing again.
 
Instead of installing again, you can even just recreate the symlink as mentioned by the message (if you know how to do that).


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