I'd argue that one is the fault of Backpack itself: it's inherently GHC-specific and was intended to be used with tooling (that is, Cabal). It really needed to be a language feature instead of a tooling hack, IMO.

On Sun, Mar 15, 2026 at 11:19 PM amindfv@mailbox.org <amindfv@mailbox.org> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 16, 2026 at 10:35:45AM +0900, Moritz Angermann via ghc-devs wrote:
> I think this highlights another point where cabal is _way_ too tightly
> coupled with the haskell compiler.

Another example might be the apparently-tight coupling between Backpack and Cabal.

Cheers,
Tom