cabal update: Local and remote files match

Question

When I try cabal update, I get:

Downloading the latest package list from hackage.haskell.org
Skipping download: Local and remote files match.
Warning: The package list for 'hackage.haskell.org' does not exist. Run 'cabal
update' to download it.

I have run cabal init

cabal update -v3 log:

Downloading the latest package list from hackage.haskell.org
Sending:
GET /packages/archive/00-index.tar.gz HTTP/1.1
Host: hackage.haskell.org
User-Agent: cabal-install/1.20.0.3 (linux; x86_64)
If-None-Match: "cb3a8478c33cbfb51929818cc8da736d"

Creating new connection to hackage.haskell.org
Received:
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/1.6.2
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Location: /packages/index.tar.gz
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2015 16:32:03 GMT
Via: 1.1 varnish
Age: 0
Connection: keep-alive
X-Served-By: cache-jfk1025-JFK
X-Cache: MISS
X-Cache-Hits: 0
X-Timer: S1434990722.961771,VS0,VE54
Content-Length: 0

301 - redirect
Redirecting to http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/index.tar.gz ...
Sending:
GET /packages/index.tar.gz HTTP/1.1
Host: hackage.haskell.org
User-Agent: cabal-install/1.20.0.3 (linux; x86_64)
If-None-Match: "cb3a8478c33cbfb51929818cc8da736d"

Recovering connection to hackage.haskell.org
Received:
HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2015 16:32:03 GMT
Via: 1.1 varnish
Cache-Control: public, no-transform, max-age=300
ETag: "cb3a8478c33cbfb51929818cc8da736d"
Age: 0
Connection: keep-alive
X-Served-By: cache-jfk1025-JFK
X-Cache: HIT
X-Cache-Hits: 1
X-Timer: S1434990723.030149,VS0,VE145

Skipping download: Local and remote files match.
Reading available packages...
Warning: The package list for 'hackage.haskell.org' does not exist. Run 
'cabal update' to download it.

My Cabal version is 1.20.0.2

The config file looks like https://gist.github.com/anonymous/fda74fa01d3113e0aeab

stack overflow is annoyingly denying my edit because there is too much code from the log so I'm adding some junk here to make it pass...

Answer 1

Perhaps you deleted .cabal/packages/hackage.haskell.org/00-index.tar, but not .cabal/packages/hackage.haskell.org/00-index.tar.gz.etag. I can reproduce the behavior you see by doing that.

Probably cabal should be smarter about handling this situation, but in any case I think that removing .cabal/packages/hackage.haskell.org/00-index.tar.gz.etag will get you unstuck.