My plan is to ship haskell platform with Cabal-1.18.1.4 (forthcoming), which is just these patches beyond the Cabal-1.18.1.3 that comes with GHC 7.8.3. This will just be an additional version of the Cabal package, in the package db that ships with the platform. I won't re-build 7.8.3 with a patched Cabal. I don't think there will be any major issues(*) with users getting a package db with two Cabal versions (cabal-install will be built against the later one).