This is puzzling. Did something instruct you that you needed to re-install cabal-install? You would already have had a copy as part of the Haskell Platform. You also already had `old-time` since it's part of the Haskell Platform too. Maybe something was overwritten in the `yum -y cabal-install`? There are several possibilities. It bugs me in any case that yum wasn't warning you that it had already installed `cabal-install`.
It is probably something very simple but would be much easier to figure out in real time, e.g. on the #haskell irc channel which generally handles such difficulties promptly. E.g. does a look at `ghc-pkg list` and `ghc-pkg check` suggest that something was broken?
(By the way, the comparison with Ruby and Python and Perl and Node is not that great; cabal is as much, or more, like `make` than `gem`, managing compilation, linking etc.; one uses it all the time locally where distribution is not in question; it looks like that is the aspect that you are bumping into.)
I didn't have "the Haskell Platform". So I got it from the same place I get all my other open source software, my distro. A quick "yum search cabal" told me where it was, I grabbed it.
And apparently it was "wrong". Becuase while it's "The Haskell Platform", it's not the correct Haskell Platform.
My point was much simpler than people here are trying to interpret: the Haskell world is a mess, and it's very complicated to get it running. So interesting tools like gitit (which I swear, I really wanted to try) don't get any attention. Expecting your audience to have the same bleeding edge copy of The Haskell Platform as you do is never going to work. Someone needs to actually do the work to package and distribute the software.
This is not true of Perl, or Python, or Ruby, or Node, all of which have recent packaged versions in the distro that run recent software.
I'm not sure that it's the wrong Haskell-Platform, nandemo's remark entails that it isnt. The naive installation would have been `yum install haskell-platform` or whatever, then `cabal update && cabal install gitit` I think you are getting bad advice because this is a completely inappropriate venue and people are having to make judgments on too little information; almost all such problems can be cleared up in 3-4 min on #haskell
You may be right about Perl &co but I invite you to look at my gem installation...
No, I'm pretty sure I have it right: "cabal-install" happens to be the package that contains the cabal binary. I installed that specifically because the instructions on the gitit page start with cabal and skip the Haskell installation; but the dependencies pull it all in automatically anyway. The problem is simply that it's too old, despite being the most recently packaged version on the most recent release of the distro. And the solution to that problem involves building the whole thing, which I'm not willing to do to try gitit.
The haskell-platform package, in every form and version on every platform also contains a cabal binary, see https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/?package=haskell-p... to see this in fedora. Some of the advice you got here was I think not good because you pretty clearly affirm that you installed the fedora Haskell Platform. On #haskell this could all have been debugged in seconds after the difficulty first appeared.
It is probably something very simple but would be much easier to figure out in real time, e.g. on the #haskell irc channel which generally handles such difficulties promptly. E.g. does a look at `ghc-pkg list` and `ghc-pkg check` suggest that something was broken?
(By the way, the comparison with Ruby and Python and Perl and Node is not that great; cabal is as much, or more, like `make` than `gem`, managing compilation, linking etc.; one uses it all the time locally where distribution is not in question; it looks like that is the aspect that you are bumping into.)