[darcs-users] Darcs 2.3 beta 3 (interim)

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2009-07-17 at 13:39 -0400, Mark Stosberg wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:37:50 -0700
> Jason Dagit <dagit at codersbase.com> wrote:

> > > I'm sure there's some Haskell documentation I could find read somewhere
> > > about how to read this, but darcs should be more user-friendly than that. It
> > > should contain all the instructions I need to install and use it, including
> > > getting cabal setup if that's the recommended way to install it, and cabal
> > > apparently doesn't always auto-configure default download servers for you.
> >  
> > Normally it does.  Do you recall how you installed cabal-install? 
> 
> I installed "cabal-install" from here, following the instructions:
> 
> http://www.haskell.org/cabal/download.html
> 
> I don't think a ~/.cabal/config was created for me as part of that.  One
> of the instructions suggested that I add a symlink-bindir entry to it.
> When I went to do that, I found the file was missing and I created it.

That's the problem. It gets created automatically the first time you run
any interesting command, like 'cabal update'. If you create it manually
first then it will not be overwritten, but on the other hand you'll
likely not add in the appropriate fields like the server to use.

The solution is to delete the ~/.cabal/config and run cabal update. Then
make any alterations to the default config.

You're not the first person to run into this infidelity in the README:
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/523

I've since updated the README so hopefully fewer new users will be
confused in the next release:

Sun Mar 15 12:54:07 GMT 2009  Duncan Coutts <duncan at haskell.org>
  * Clarify the instructions in the README and bootstrap.sh
  Addresses the complaint in ticket #523.

Duncan