Perhaps the major cause is that because GHC is shipped as a library itself, it exposes all it's package dependencies. And as it is a large, and growing, piece of software, the list only wants to grow. But I wonder how often GHC is used as a library itself? If not often, then perhaps GHC should be shipped as two parts: Just a compiler (plus the small number of packages that the compiler forces), and ghc-lib as an optional, even separate, package - perhaps one with even a traditional way of depending on other packages. In otherwords, users that wanted to incorporate the ghc-lib into their programs would depend, and download, and configure, and build, ghc-lib indpenendant of the GHC binaries installed on their system. Perhaps then, GHC, the compiler, built from ghc-lib, would be bootstrapped not from the past compiler, but from the past HP.....