Hello, OK good news! Here's a patch to make cabal-install use the tarball index format discussed in the previous email. (I finally gave up in trying to do a whole refactoring, which I started from scratch many times, and started a more seamless integration of ideas in the existing code.) Since we don't rely on any program to do the QA, check that the packagename directory and the name of the tarball and the name inside the .cabal file are the same case-sensitively before adding it. The instructions for those eager of making a repository: 1. mkdir -p packages/packagename 2. cp package-version.tar.gz packages/packagename/ 3. GOTO 1 for each package you want in the repository 4. tar --create --gzip --file packages/00-index.tar.gz --exclude '*.tar.gz' --directory packages/ . # don't miss the last dot in the above command! I need help on one matter--I am not sure about pkgUrl: If I enable multiple repositories and scan the local hierarchy after having downloaded the files from all of them, it becomes impossible to map files to urls. So the solution could be having multiple repositories whose names are the urlEncoded strings of the actual repositories' urls. If having just one repository doesn't bother anyone too much, I'd like to know what do you think it's worth doing next. Also, I'd like to have some feedback on this patch, I am not sure I did not make any mistake! Peace, Paolo. P.S. Lemmih, I did make the little modification to TarUtils.extractTarFile dcoutts suggested, do you think it is okay? Another possibility could be passing the directory to `cd' to, via the -C option, I'd like to hear what you think. --