[[!comment format=mdwn username="joey" subject="""comment 2""" date="2015-09-09T22:25:55Z" content=""" Propellor needs to build itself from source on the host it's provisioning, and so it needs to install its haskell library dependencies. It first does this by trying to apt-get install all the relevant packages. However, that might fail for some reason, including perhaps that new enough versions of some library is not available to apt-get. So, it then also asks cabal to install any missing dependencies. This is where the `cabal update` comes in. I'd rather only do that if apt didn't install all necessary deps, but I don't currently know how to check that, so it does it always. It looks like cabal may be allocating too much memory to work on your arm router. This could be because of a problem in depenedency resolution, which sometimes runs cabal out of memory even on big boxes, or it could just be too memory hungry to be practical there. The smallest system I've successfully run git-annex on had 500 mb of memory. IIRC, most memory is used when ghc is compiling propellor. """]]