Hi all, So, I was feeling a bit frustrated about the complexity of the Cabal sandbox code, and when I get frustrated I start deleting things... Just for funzies I tried deleting all the obvious non-sandbox code in cabal-install, and here's the result: https://github.com/BardurArantsson/cabal/commit/27aa116cc0ab3c824bd80c175ecb... As you can see it means the removal of 218 lines, but most importantly IMO it drastically simplifies the code in some places, notably loadConfigOrSandboxConfig (funnily enough) becomes trivial and classifyPackageEnvironment disappears (conincidence? I think not.). I'm sure there are quite a few other things that could also be removed. I've left a few notes sprinkled in the code marked by XXX. Obviously, this isn't mergeable as-is[1] and I mostly did it for a lark, but what do you guys think? Is this something that could/should be pursued further? I seem to recall hearing some rumblings that some people really wanted cabal-install to be sandbox-only. I think this little Proof of Concept shows that it would be beneficial at least from a code complexity/maintenance perspective. (I certainly know that I've been getting really frustrated trying to implement #2810 because the code is incredibly *gnarly* because it has to account for a lot of combinations of things, and this might be a good way to try to reverse the tide of option-itis.) Regards, /b [1] For one thing, there's need to be some sort of deprecation period of non-sandbox mode at the very least. :)