On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 3:22 AM, Emil Axelsson <emax@chalmers.se> wrote:
Hello!

I've had some of the usual problems with packages depending on multiple versions of another package. It seems the root of the hole problem was that I once attempted to run

 cabal install cabal-install

This brought in a number of older packages (Cabal-1.8.0.6, containers-0.3.0.0, directory-1.0.1.2, filepath-1.1.0.4, process-1.0.1.5) to my local package DB, which led to inconsistencies when trying to install new packages.

However, if I run

 cabal install cabal-install-0.10.2

things work just fine. So the problem is that it wants to install an older version of cabal-install. A session demonstrating the problem is found below.

Why doesn't cabal always install the latest packages?

I consider this a bug but it's actually an intentional feature by the cabal developers.  I explained it in the past here:
http://osdir.com/ml/haskell-cafe@haskell.org/2010-09/msg00758.html