Based on my own misadventures and Albert Y. C. Lai's SICP (http://www.vex.net/~trebla/haskell/sicp.xhtml) it seems the that root of all install problems is that reinstalling a particular version of a particular package deletes any other existing builds of that version, even if other packages already depend on them. Deleting perfectly good versions seems to be the root of all package management problems. There are already hashes to keep incompatible builds of a package separate. Would anything break if existing packages were left alone when a new version was installed? (perhaps preferring the most recent if a package flag specifies version but not hash). For example, It seems the butterfly effect http://cdsmith.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/the-butterfly-effect-in-cabal/ could be avoided if the package database was allowed to simultaneously contain a "twittertags-1.0.0-hashA" and "twittertags-1.0.0-hashB" built against different dependencies. The obvious difficulty is a little more trouble to manually specify packages. Are there any other problems with this idea? Brandon