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I just released a simple tool to Hackage called stackage-update. Instead of repeating myself, below is a copy-paste of the README.md from the Github repository.

This package provides an executable, stackage-update , which provides the same functionality as cabal update (it updates your local package index). However, instead of downloading the entire package index as a compressed tarball over insecure HTTP, it uses git to incrementally update your package list, and downloads over secure HTTPS.

It has minimal Haskell library dependencies (all dependencies are shipped with GHC itself) and only requires that the git executable be available on the PATH. It builds on top of the all-cabal-files repository.

Advantages

Versus standard cabal update , using stackage-update gives the following advantages:

Only downloads the deltas from the last time you updated your index, threby requiring significantly less bandwidth

Downloads over a secure HTTPS connection instead of an insecure HTTP connection Note that the all-cabal-files repo is also updated from Hackage over a secure HTTPS connection



Usage

Install from Hackage as usual with:

cabal update cabal install stackage-update

From then on, simply run stackage-update instead of cabal update .

Why stackage?

You may be wondering why this tool is called stackage-update , when in fact the functionality is useful outside of the Stackage project itself. The reason is that the naming allows it to play nicely with the other Stackage command line tooling. Concretely, that means that if you have stackage-cli installed, stackage-update works as a plugin. However, you can certainly use stackage-update on its own without any other tooling or dependencies on the Stackage project.

Future enhancements