Hello, http://nix.cs.uu.nl/index.html "Nix is a purely functional package manager. This means that it treats packages like values in purely functional programming languages such as Haskell - they are built by functions that don't have side-effects, and they never change after they have been built." To me, it sounds like the ideal solution to package/make/build management in general and Cabal/Hackage/Cabal-install in particular. After all, compilation is just a _pure_ function compile :: Source -> Dependencies -> Object So, the suggestion is to use Nix for Hackage/Cabal. This way, we get package installation/deinstallation for free. I didn't look into it, but it seems that the package description language can express most content from .cabal files and I guess that it even eliminates the need for most of Cabal's functionality like finding compilers and such. The only drawback is that Nix uses a home-brew functional language for package descriptions. Of course, it would be ideal to have a Haskell DSL for that :) Regards, apfelmus