[Peaker]

I am not saying cabal is perfect, but the situation has dramatically improved since the prevention of spurious reinstalls. It also seems that hackage uploaders are playing nicer these days, and I just generally get far less breakage.

Lots of work is being done on Haskell's package system to make it better.

I've been using Haskell for 5 years. It used to be very painful. It is only rarely painful these days.

[codewright]

It's rarely painful these days because you've spent 5 years learning it.

[Peaker]

Experience comes into it too, but as I mentioned earlier, they mostly fixed the "butteryfly problem" by avoiding spurious reinstalls. The butterfly problem was the source of at least 90% of the pain relating to cabal installations.

They are also going to allow multiple installations of the same package version with differing dependencies very soon, which will help alleviate some of the final problems still there with cabal.

I do think that it is not my relatively smooth experience that is the anomaly, but your unsmooth recent experience. Perhaps your installation was somehow borked? Perhaps you were trying to install new packages using a very old "cabal-install" that still had long-fixed issues?

If you just install the newest Haskell Platform and run "cabal install cabal-install" that does work on Linux. For Windows, IIRC, you also need to install cygwin/mingw (well-documented) and then it is a smooth install as well. I don't know about OS X but it is generally smoother than Windows.

Can you describe in more detail the actual problem you encountered?