[Haskell-beginners] cabal binary packages

I need to build some software on a server, but it doesn't have enough spare memory for compiling all the dependencies. I would like to create a binary distribution of e.g. snap including all of its dependencies (other than those which come with ghc), so that the server can just install them. I found http://www.haskell.org/cabal/users-guide/installing-packages.html#creating-a..., but this seems to have two deficiencies - the destination prefix needs to be know in advance (which might be OK if it can be a relative path), and it has to be done individually for each package.