Cabal fails to install dependencies, but can install them if asked directly

I've seen a very strange recurring problem with Cabal that's interfering with my ability to get repeatable Haskell builds. I have a cabal project with a sandbox. If I do cabal install, I get errors of the form

Y failed during the building phase. The exception was: ExitFailure 1 X depends on Y which failed to install.

where X is a direct dependency of my project and Y is some transitive dependency. However, if I just type cabal install X, then it works!

Here's a specific example: my project depends on the interpolate package. When I do cabal install --allow-newer, I get errors like this:

Resolving dependencies...
Configuring haskell-src-meta-0.6.0.9...
Building haskell-src-meta-0.6.0.9...
Preprocessing library haskell-src-meta-0.6.0.9...
[1 of 6] Compiling Language.Haskell.TH.Instances.Lift ( src/Language/Haskell/TH/Instances/Lift.hs, dist/dist-sandbox-d2861272/build/Language/Haskell/TH/Instances/Lift.o )
[2 of 6] Compiling Language.Haskell.Meta.Syntax.Translate ( src/Language/Haskell/Meta/Syntax/Translate.hs, dist/dist-sandbox-d2861272/build/Language/Haskell/Meta/Syntax/Translate.o )
[3 of 6] Compiling Language.Haskell.Meta.Parse ( src/Language/Haskell/Meta/Parse.hs, dist/dist-sandbox-d2861272/build/Language/Haskell/Meta/Parse.o )
[4 of 6] Compiling Language.Haskell.Meta.Parse.Careful ( src/Language/Haskell/Meta/Parse/Careful.hs, dist/dist-sandbox-d2861272/build/Language/Haskell/Meta/Parse/Careful.o )
[5 of 6] Compiling Language.Haskell.Meta ( src/Language/Haskell/Meta.hs, dist/dist-sandbox-d2861272/build/Language/Haskell/Meta.o )
[6 of 6] Compiling Language.Haskell.Meta.Utils ( src/Language/Haskell/Meta/Utils.hs, dist/dist-sandbox-d2861272/build/Language/Haskell/Meta/Utils.o )

src/Language/Haskell/Meta/Utils.hs:67:1:
    Duplicate instance declarations:
      instance Typeable Q
        -- Defined at src/Language/Haskell/Meta/Utils.hs:67:1
      instance Typeable Q -- Defined in ‘Language.Haskell.TH.Instances’

src/Language/Haskell/Meta/Utils.hs:71:1:
    Duplicate instance declarations:
      instance Typeable QuasiQuoter
        -- Defined at src/Language/Haskell/Meta/Utils.hs:71:1
      instance Typeable QuasiQuoter
        -- Defined in ‘Language.Haskell.TH.Instances’
Failed to install haskell-src-meta-0.6.0.9

...

haskell-src-meta-0.6.0.9 failed during the building phase. The exception was:
ExitFailure 1
interpolate-0.1.0 depends on haskell-src-meta-0.6.0.9 which failed to install.

However, if I proceed to type cabal install interpolate-0.1.0, the installation succeeds and I'm able to keep installing my project.

This is frustrating because I have to "manually" install several packages before I can get all my dependencies installed. The fact that the original installations fail with compiler errors seems to suggest that the compiler is configured differently somehow?

I'm using GHC 7.8.3 and cabal-install 1.22.4.0 (version 1.22.3.0 of the Cabal library). Many thanks for any help!

Solution

Actually it's not a problem with the version of haskell-src-meta but rather with the version of its dependency th-orphans.

haskell-src-meta (versions 0.6.0.8 and 0.6.0.9) has an upper bound th-orphans <0.12.

With --allow-newer you told Cabal to ignore version upper bounds, so Cabal decided to use th-orphans version 0.12.0, since it's newer and presumably better. But, in fact, haskell-src-meta really does not build with th-orphans version 0.12.0, as you found out.

Unrestricted use of --allow-newer is likely to run into this kind of problem in general. It's better to specify the packages whose upper bounds you want to ignore with --allow-newer=base,containers,..., though in some cases doing so can be rather tedious.

In the first sentence of your question you mentioned repeatable builds. If that is what you want, there is no substitute for simply recording the exact versions that you want of all of your direct and indirect dependencies.