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!