Some of the cabal ports have there own freebsd ports but not many and the ones that are there are usually old anyway. Luckily the cabal packages on hackage work just fine and I was installing manually each one like: runhaskell Setup.lhs configure --user runhaskell Setup.lhs build runhaskell Setup.lhs install because I was assuming that there was some reason why cabal-install could not be used on freebsd. Eventually I realized that this was not true and installing the packages that have lots of dependencies actually became more worthwhile as it was very tedious before. I was then using cabal with the exception of choosing the port versions if they existed as if there would be some advantage in doing so. It wasn't long before I ran into a port that didn't build (maybe because it was old) so I tried letting cabal just pull the later one from hackage. This built just fine. I shall probably remove the other freebsd haskell ports from my system and replace with updated hackage ones. What's the point of all this? I think if freebsd only had ports for the basic stuff like haskell platform and other compilers then it could potentially make it easier for the devs/testers to finally get the updated ghc 6.12.1 version in the main tree. Sorry if this sounds harsh but it seems like the current setup is stale, messy and inconsistent which could be trimmed down, maintained + cabal is a package that really does need to be in the ports but currently isn't so. Thanks