As of franchise-0.0.2 and cabal-install-0.5.10 it works to: $ cabal install franchise Previously the difficulty was in compiling the Setup.hs script that franchise uses. Of course it's Setup.hs script imports other modules from the local package. This is basically the same as how the Cabal library is bootstrapped. Previously cabal-install was not telling ghc to look in the right place to pick up other local modules. So franchise is the first build system (apart from Cabal itself) to implement the Cabal package spec. Which is nice. The main ongoing difficulty will be that cabal-install and other packaging systems, rpm, etc assume rather more than the original minimal command line interface that the Cabal spec described. Currently for "build-type: Custom" cabal-install assumes a number of command line flags that are provided by the Cabal library implementation and are not specified in the original spec. That's something we may want to look at if we foresee multiple implementations coming into common use. Duncan