[Haskell-cafe] cabal --user question

Hi, How do I install a package in the user package.conf with cabal? It is not clear to me how to do this, looking at the output of 'configure --help'. There is an option "--user" to get dependencies from the user cabal file but this still, somewhat counterintuitively, tries to install the package in the global location (why would one want such behavior?). Specifying '--with-hc-pkg="ghc-pkg --user"' doesn't seem to work either, when I do this then 'install' and 'unregister' complete without error but apparently have no effect. Thanks in advance, Frederik