Why there is no switch to turn off any use of proxy in cabal-install? Or to supply username/password pair in command line. I have a strange situation: wget works like charm ignoring proxy (I downloaded Cabal and cabal-install to investigate the problem using wget), Firefox works like charm igoring proxy, and only cabal cannot access anything, because it follows proper proxy protocol and our proxy requires username and password. And I don't know of proper way to supply them through http_proxy environment variable. The most annoying part is that it is too much work to download and build cabal using wget and scripts - I once tried it for some other utility and didn't succeed. PS And while I am on it, I'd like to suggest that cabal-install should read common options like credentials from environment or configuration file.