I am personally finding the process of contributing to cabal much more painful than it would be if it were on github.

I think the project is losing on contributions, and that's a shame, for the following reasons:

A) A contributor isn't certain his contribution will be accepted, and if it isn't, his effort is in vain.  He may very well give up before starting. With github, worst-case he can maintain a hosted fork, and point people to it.

B) Even if it is accepted, *until* it is, he has no easy way of pointing people to his fork, unlike on github.

C) Making a pull request is much easier and less trouble than registering to a mailing list, and the overheads associated with communicating email patches.  I think most collaborators will gladly spend hours improving cabal, but would rather not spend minutes on patch sending overheads.

Please move development of cabal to github or at least a darcs-hosting site where it is easy to make hosted forks and send pull requests.

Eyal