Jeremy, I've briefly been following your posts about building wx using Cabal (for the benefit of other cabal-devel readers the latest is:) http://wewantarock.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/building-a-shared-library-in-cab... I want to make sure we don't lose what the core problem is and I'd like to work out what the "right" solution would be in terms of extra Cabal features. Perhaps you can translate into a feature request ticket that says what the core problem is (e.g. is it simply that static linking does not work for this C lib etc). Without yet understanding all the details, my first impression is that this problem would fit well with a feature I've been imagining for defining "foreign library" sections in a .cabal file, as opposed to Haskell libraries. These could contain C,C++ code as normal, but would be built using the platform rules, rather than the Haskell compiler rules. I don't yet understand why you've got a constraint on using a shared library, but perhaps the thing to do is simply to allow foreign lib sections to state such a constraint, e.g. the point might be to make a shared lib for a plugin, so a static lib is not the goal. Otoh, if it's possible to both build a static and shared lib from the same description, that's probably a useful thing in many circumstances. Duncan