Andrew Coppin wrote:

Indeed. I've heard a few people claim that cabal-install is the best thing since sliced bread, but I've never touched it. I don't even know where to get it. (Presumably this will become fairly obvious once I go look for it...)

Fortunately, it turns out that a trivial Google search is all that is required to locate cabal-install. (Assuming you already know it exists.) Unfortunately I got as far as actually downloading the sources from Hackage before discovering that on Windows you actually need to download the pre-build binary. (Couldn't you mention this on the Hackage download page?)

Also fortunately, it appears to be pretty trivial to operate cabal-install. I didn't bother reading any instructions, just cabal --help. (Not sure why it needs to download the package list from Hackage - or where it puts it. But I'm sure there's a good reason.)

Rather less fortunately, it still doesn't actually fix my problem:

E:\Haskell\AOC-HalfInteger>cabal configure
Resolving dependencies...
Configuring AOC-HalfInteger-1.0...

E:\Haskell\AOC-HalfInteger>cabal sdist

Building source dist for AOC-HalfInteger-1.0...
Preprocessing library AOC-HalfInteger-1.0...

Source tarball created: dist\AOC-HalfInteger-1.0.tar.gz
cabal: dist\src\sdist.1288\AOC-HalfInteger-1.0\Data\HalfInteger.hs: removeFile: permission denied (Permission denied)

I have no idea what the hell it's upset about now... I've now been trying to create this damned tarball since 5PM yesterday, and I still haven't managed it. At this point I'm losing the will to continue with this crazy project. Clearly this is way too much effort to expend just to upload 50 lines of code.