As a user of both http-client and tls, I can vouch for having very good experience with both, and I thank Michael for his offer. I prefer that option. However - Both extra Haskell dependencies and C dependencies are a problem for cabal-install. The reason is that cabal is a basic requirement to bootstrap a Haskell installation from scratch. So either of those will make life very much harder for distro packagers, builders of Haskell Platform or other such from-scratch installation options, and anyone who needs to get a Haskell tool chain installed on a platform that is non-standard in some way. So I suggest that we have basic cabal-install - perhaps stripped down even more than it is now - which is designed for easy porting, with no C dependency and minimal Haskell dependencies. Furthermore, that basic cabal-install does need some SSL option - probably Gershom's shell-out option, even though I don't prefer that for every day use, because it can be implemented with minimal dependencies. The reason is the same - for porting. Once you have cabal-install-basic installed, the only thing you may ever use it for is a one-time installation of full cabal-install. But that's a very sensitive installation - if that is compromised, you're hosed. So if there's any time you need SSL, it's then. In summary - I vote for cabal-install-basic with no C deps, very minimal Haskell deps, possibly stripped-down cabal functionality if needed, and a simple SSL shell-out option designed for maximum portability. And then, one or more full-featured cabal-install packages, with one of them being the tls option. Thanks, Yitz