Hi, after Andrew Coppin's odissey [1], I also had a few problem with cabal, which stopped installing new packages. Details will follow; meanwhile, here are some questions prompted by what happened: - when recompiling a package with ABI changes, does cabal always update dependent packages? It seems "not always" - it didn't update itself, nor refuse the breaking upgrade, and the ABI breakage caused linker errors on Setup.hs. Luckily, cabal was already linked so I could always use it for queries. - can cabal extract and check dependencies as specified in the .hi files? I had a broken dependency which I could see with "grep" but not otherwise. - is there a "specification" of which are the "core" packages? Not sure if this is more useful as a bug report or as discussion, or if I just misused cabal and it's the only perfect software in the world; still I wanted to share my experience. Also I am not sure if this is the best place - but I'm not subscribed to other lists, and the previous "cabal odissey" was posted here, so I hope it's fine. A related idea is that Gentoo had a tool which not only extracted such dependencies, but recompiled all affected packages. While package removal is not supported through cabal, it is sometimes needed (and well, it should be supported at some point). See for instance this FAQ: http://www.haskell.org/cabal/FAQ.html#dependencies-conflict My problem seems a nastier variation of the one described there :-(. Details follow. Best regards [1] http://groups.google.com/group/haskell-cafe/browse_thread/thread/787c67b31fa... -- Paolo Giarrusso - Ph.D. Student http://www.informatik.uni-marburg.de/~pgiarrusso/