Hello, I've made some tweaks to the bootstrap.sh here: https://github.com/JakeWheat/cabal/tree/bootstrap-tweaks 1. It avoids downloading the additional haskell package tarballs if these tarballs are already present in the current directory. Motivation: easily install on machines not connected to the internet, and make install more robust against local internet connection problems (we have a lot of these). 2. The SCOPE_OF_INSTALLATION variable use is slightly changed to allow installing cabal-install executable without either using or altering the user's package database, or replacing any cabal-install executable which they already have. Example: ghc-pkg init /home/jake/test_cabal/ SCOPE_OF_INSTALLATION='--global --package-db=/home/jake/test_cabal/packagedb' PREFIX=/home/jake/test_cabal/prefix ./bootstrap.sh Is it possible to put these changes into the main cabal repo? If there are some changes which would make the patch acceptable then please let me know. Also, is there a simpler way to meet these goals which I missed? Thanks, Jake Wheat