The cabal-version field seems pretty mysterious. Recommendation: Set it no higher than >= 1.10, Cabal will warn you if it's too low. This field contains the format of the cabal file, the number corresponds to the Cabal release. Hence this version is incremented more often than the format actually changes. There have been no significant changes between 1.10 and 1.20. The Cabal source is surprisingly helpful as a changelog: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/blob/641e854ae663e2b34f34ecc11ba663ac3a9bdc... By setting it too high you risk users getting errors like "The package 'foo' requires Cabal library version -any && >=1.14 but no suitable version is installed." This can be problematic for anyone using an older GHC or if there are Cabal releases outside of the GHC release cycle. You may get this error even if you have a newer Cabal if it doesn't ship with GHC. Happy hacking, Adam