Hello all, I know Duncan and SPJ have been keen on removing GHC's dependency on Cabal for some time now. Simon and I were chatting about the subject today, and we wanted to propose an alternative way of doing the remodularization. Here are diagrams of the proposals: http://web.mit.edu/~ezyang/Public/ghc-cabal-refactor.pdf As I understand it, Duncan's proposal is to take the current constellation of libraries, and just remove the dependency to Cabal from GHC and bin-package-db, duplicating data structures as necessary. ghc-pkg is now responsible for converting between Cabal's format and GHC's format. Simon suggested that this 'ghc-pkg' functionality (which specifies the database format and how to handle it) should be placed in a library of its own. So in the third graph, we have a new package ghc-db which everyone depends on. Cabal no longers shells out to ghc-pkg to modify database, instead it directly converts to ghc-db's format and then invokes library functions in the library. We were wondering if there was any reason to prefer the former situation over the latter. One answer might be that Cabal is less keen to have a dependency on a very GHC specific library (although the ghc-pkg dependency is quite a fairly tightly coupled one.) Cheers, Edward