upgrading problems with Cabal

[rw111]

The following command line conversation with Cabal shows that I can't use it to upgrade Alex. I don't use Haskell very often and need it only to install other software for which Alex is a dependency, so apologies if I have missed something that is obvious. As I see it it just doesn't succeed in upgrading Alex.

robert@robert-HP:~$ cabal --version cabal-install version 3.10.1.0 compiled using version 3.10.1.0 of the Cabal library

robert@robert-HP:~$ cabal info alex

• alex (program) Synopsis: Alex is a tool for generating lexical analysers in Haskell Versions available: 2.2, 2.3.3, 2.3.4, 2.3.5, 3.1.7, 3.2.5, 3.2.6, 3.3.0.0, 3.4.0.0 (and 27 others) Versions installed: [ Unknown ] Homepage: http://www.haskell.org/alex/ Bug reports: https://github.com/haskell/alex/issues Description: Alex is a tool for generating lexical analysers in Haskell. It takes a description of tokens based on regular expressions and generates a Haskell module containing code for scanning text efficiently. It is similar to the tool lex or flex for C/C++. Category: Development License: BSD3 Author: Chris Dornan and Simon Marlow Maintainer: https://github.com/haskell/alex Source repo: https://github.com/haskell/alex.git Executables: alex Dependencies: base >=2.1 && <5, array, containers, directory, base, process Cached: Yes

robert@robert-HP:~$ alex --version Alex version 3.2.5, (c) 2003 Chris Dornan and Simon Marlow

robert@robert-HP:~$ cabal install alex-3.4.0.0 --overwrite-policy=always Resolving dependencies... Symlinking 'alex' to '/home/robert/.cabal/bin/alex'

robert@robert-HP:~$ alex --version Alex version 3.2.5, (c) 2003 Chris Dornan and Simon Marlow

[andreasabel]

This looks like a PATH problem. Have you tried which alex? You need ~/.cabal/bin in your PATH before the entry that supplies the ghc-shipped alex.

[rw111]

Yes, that was it. Thanks.

[andreasabel]

Great!