I haven't totally followed this whole thread, so apologies if this isn't entirely relevant, but I use shake for building, and cabal for dependencies. The shakefile has the list of packages and required versions, and generates the .cabal file, which is used with --only-dependencies to get dependencies. I think it works well. I can't do builds in cabal anyway since it can't handle anything complicated, but even if I had a simple build I'd prefer shake since it's so much nicer. Since it's in haskell, it's flexible but can't be analyzed, though I can't think of why you'd want to analyze it. Meanwhile, cabal is just fine at expressing packages and versions, and is basically just a way to tell cabal-install what to download and install. Since I generate it, I don't care much about the format, but the existing one seems perfectly adequate.