Oops, I guess I misinterpreted "package description".  It did sound a little dangerous ;-).

What you suggested also worked.  I'm in good shape now. 

Thanks again,
   -Ryan

On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 11:24 AM, Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts@googlemail.com> wrote:
On Mon, 2011-01-31 at 09:52 -0500, Ryan Newton wrote:
> Victory!  Thanks!
>
> Well.. mostly victory ;-).  I've got it in a state where the .cabal
> file rewriting works if "cabal configure" is called separately from
> "cabal build/install" so that the latter reads the modified
> configuration file.

Yikes! Don't actually modify the .cabal file on disk. I meant just
modify the data structure that gets passed around.

> As for portability...  I'm afraid I don't personally do any
> development on Windows.  Presumably the goal is for hackage packages
> to work without requiring Cygwin/make/etc?

Right.

Duncan