Dear all Currently if cabal-install encounters a parse failure in the configuration file it just uses the default configuration with a warning. This seems like the wrong behaviour to me since it is only correct if the user was using the default configuration and then updated to a newer version of cabal-install which caused the old default-config to be syntactically correct. A much more common reason is that the user has made an error when editing their config file and in this case using the default configuration is almost certainly the wrong thing to do. Attached is a patch to "die" on configuration parse failure while also writing out a default configuration to ~/.cabal/config.default that the user can use if they so wish. regards allan