Replying somewhere random in the thread. Linux distributions have to solve this same problem. We first need to decide what Hackage's function is supposed to be: (1) A dumb repository to host Haskell code (2) A collection of Haskell packages that work together In reality it's (1), but the existence of cabal-install supposes (2). The way that distributions handle this is to assign maintainers to each and every package in the distro, and require them all to be actively maintained. Packages that don't build or have unresponsive upstreams are removed. Maintainers who don't do their jobs are removed after a while, too. The end result is that there are somewhat fewer packages /visible/ to the user, but a comparable amount /available/, since what's in the distro is what actually would have worked if the user tried to build it himself. I think there's value to having (1), but that we shouldn't expect (2) at the same time. Tons of work goes into QA'ing packages to work together. Someone needs to be responsible for making sure that things work; right now no one is, so they don't. Running a "Haskell distro" on a parallel Hackage would be a lot of work but Arch, Debian, Gentoo, etc. already have to do essentially that. It may make sense to either consolidate the effort, or reuse what work is already being done. The gentoo-haskell[1] project already keeps a list of packages that are known to build from source together. Something like prefix[2] for example could be used to install packages that have been vetted rather than just pulling a tarball with the right name directly from Hackage. Or if that's too much trouble, we could write a reverse hackport[3] that creates a second Hackage full of stuff known to work in the various distributions. No solution will be great at first, but we have the "benefit" that it doesn't work right now either so maybe nobody will notice. Without everyone duplicating the QA effort, I think things would shape up quickly. [1] https://github.com/gentoo-haskell/gentoo-haskell [2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/ [3] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hackport