And then I was playing around with the scala tools that come in the installation’s bin folder. There is something there called sbaz, and this name sounds so different that I just HAD to play with it to find out what it does.

Lets first explain what I discovered later: what sbaz does. It is some kind of scala package manager for your local scala installation. If you issue a sbaz available, it will list all packages it is able to install for you, for example. Also, and this was the somewhat tricky part for me, it is able to upgrade all current packages to their latest versions, including the main scala stuff, like the scala-library.

This is all great.. as long as you don’t run sbaz upgrade by mistake. This happened some weeks ago to me… And I was lucky enough to not have any major problem. I was running scala 2.8.0 at the time, and 2.9.0 was already out. Result: I upgraded to scala 2.9.0 before I intended to… and one day before a speech I gave at a conference, where I presented plenty of scala code examples.

In the end all went well, but I had to update some sample code, and to upgrade the Netbeans scala plugin to the version that supports 2.9.0. The other option would be to erase the installation folder and install scala from scratch again, but I chose to use this “event” to upgrade to 2.9.0 for real =)

Bottom line: learn that scala has a very nice package manager tool called sbaz, but use it with care 😉