Audrey Teng and I hacked on cabal-get a few weeks ago. Some details are here: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/62 Basically, Audrey was able to talk me out of my "smart server, dumb clients" stance. HackageDB is now just a directory tree with an index file. She also implemented better local install for mutiple cabal packages with cabal-get. I haven't played with this much. The way it's going to work, at least for the short term, is that anyone w/ access to monk.haskell.org (aka darcs) will be able to run the 'put' program to add packages to hackage. Anyway, take a look at the code and tell me what you think. xerox is going to be working on it for his SoC project, as we started to outline here: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/87 peace, isaac