Note: I'm pretty new to Haskell, I've only experimented with it during COMP 524, and written some pretty basic functions.
So I decided I wanted to try to throw together a quick web server together with Haskell, but it's been a small disaster setting up the tools necessary.
OS: Ubuntu 12.10
The first thing I did was create a folder for my experiment, under ~/Documents/Code/haskell
I then ran sudo apt-get install haskell-platform to get ghci and cabal, Haskell's package manager. I then wanted to create cabal sandbox, so I ran cabal sandbox init and this was the beginning of a two-hour struggle...
As it turns out, the out-of-the-box Haskell platform ships with cabal v1.14, and the sandboxing was added in v1.18. The current, stable version of cabal, mind you, is v1.20. So, I ran: cabal install cabal cabal-install which seems to me like cabal bootstrapping itself, similar to npm's bootstrap updater. After cabal updated, I attempted to initialize the sandbox again, but I received the same error as before.
To cut to the chase, I had to prepend the path to the cabal folder, located at ~/.cabal/ to my path variable.
So to walk through what I've done so far:
sudo apt-get install haskell-platform
cabal install cabal cabal-install
PATH='~/.cabal/bin:$PATH'
This was after breaking symlinks, purging broken Haskell packages, and uninstalling/reinstalling at least twice...
So if you get this far, make sure you test your version of cabal by running:
cabal -V
If you see version 1.18 or higher, you're good to go. So finally, I got the sandbox up. But this was not the end of my struggles.