mysterious cabal-install problems

Question

With a clean install of the "Haskell Platform". (OS X Snow-Leopard & Platform 2010.1.0.1), doing this causes simple sequence causes very weird cabal install behaviour:

$ cabal install time

$ cabal install random

$ ghc-pkg list random
/Library/Frameworks/GHC.framework/Versions/612/usr/lib/ghc-6.12.1/package.conf.d
   random-1.0.0.2
/Users/yairc/.ghc/i386-darwin-6.12.1/package.conf.d
   random-1.0.0.2

random-1.0.0.2 is installed twice in my system. and now doing cabal install random reinstalls random-1.0.0.2 every time.

Looks like random depends on time, and cabal wants to reinstall it after there's a new version of time available? And because of two random-1.0.0.2 cabal is confused and always thinks it's not up to date because it's looking at the first one?

ghc-pkg check finds no errors.

Answer 1

Please do

ghc-pkg check

and if that shows no errors, let's see the output from

ghc-pkg list -v

and

cabal install random -v

Edit: I can reproduce your problem with GHC 6.12.1, but not with 6.12.2, using exactly the same version of cabal-install (0.8.0). I'll look into it.

Edit 2: reported as a bug in cabal-install.