I'm reposting this here as something bad appeared to happen to my post on haskell-cafe and I probably should have posted here anyway. Cabal-install is looking good. I needed only two deps outside of Cabal-1.4. I installed cabal-install-0.5 on ubuntu with the haskell.org linux binary for ghc 6.8.2. I then tried cabal-install yi Got this output: ... many successful installs ... Registering vty-3.0.1... Reading package info from "dist/installed-pkg-config" ... done. Saving old package config file... done. Writing new package config file... done. Downloading yi-0.3... [1 of 1] Compiling Main ( Setup.hs, dist/setup/Main.o ) Setup.hs:9:0: Warning: Deprecated use of `showPackageId' (imported from Distribution.Simple, but defined in Distribution.Package): use the Text class instead Linking dist/setup/setup ... Warning: defaultUserHooks in Setup script is deprecated. Configuring yi-0.3... Warning: Instead of 'ghc-options: -DDYNAMIC -DFRONTEND_VTY' use 'cpp-options: -DDYNAMIC -DFRONTEND_VTY' setup: alex version >=2.0.1 && <3 is required but it could not be found. cabal: Error: some packages failed to install: yi-0.3 failed during the configure step. The exception was: exit: ExitFailure 1 Is this a cabal problem of package problem? I would have expected it to fail immediately instead of discover this problem so far into process. Thanks. -- Darrin