cabal cabal-install error in Ubuntu 14.04

Question

I followed the procedure here for installing GHC and cabal, and then for ghc-mod.

But, I get this error at this step

cabal update && cabal install cabal-install

Configuring cabal-install-1.24.0.2... Failed to install cabal-install-1.24.0.2 cabal: Error: some packages failed to install: cabal-install-1.24.0.2 failed during the configure step. ExitFailure 11

Answer 1

If you install haskell-platform via apt-get, version of ghc is under 7.10.3 until yakkety (Ubuntu 16.10).

This is problematic because cabal-1.24 requires ghc >= 8.0.1.

To solve this

1. install more recent version of ghc from its code,
2. just use stack and ghc-mod for stack.

P.S. if you are emacsen, I recommand you to use intero (site) instead of ghc-mod.