I've got patches for Cabal and cabal-install which change the command line handling code fairly significantly. In Cabal itself the command line UI should not have changed at all, it's just refactoring in Cabal. For cabal-install it's all different as it now uses the infrastructure from the Cabal lib rather than it's own stuff. The main point of this change is to allow cabal-install to take the same command line flags as Setup.hs but also to combine it with it's own saved settings and then call Setup.hs to install packages. We also want cabal-install to have the same sub-commands as Setup.hs has currently so that it can become the primary command line UI for the cabal/hackage system. So I'd most appreciate if people could test the patches. You need the latest darcs versions of Cabal and cabal-install and then darcs apply the appropriate patch set. for Cabal lib (HEAD branch): http://darcs.haskell.org/cabal/ http://haskell.org/~duncan/cabal/cabal-command-line.dpatch darcs apply cabal-command-line.dpatch for cabal-install program: http://darcs.haskell.org/cabal-install/ http://haskell.org/~duncan/cabal/cabal-install-command-line.dpatch darcs apply cabal-install-command-line.dpatch Thanks! Duncan