Hello, I ran into a problem while trying to debianize libraries that use cabal. I want to provide profiling libraries by default, but I want them to be provided in a seperate .deb, so that you do not have to install them if you don't need them. So for 'mylib' I would generate two .debs: libghc6-mylib-dev libghc6-mylib-prof Cabal already has an --enable-library-profiling flag, but this causes the profiling and non-profiling libraries to be compiled at the same time into the same directory tree. This means I have to use regular expression to try to move the profiling libraries into a seperate package. I think a better solution would be to provide a mechanism to disable building the vanilla libraries, such as: --enable-library-vanilla --disable-library-vanilla This could also be extended to support other flags in the future, like: --enable/disable-library-parallel --enable/disable-library-bytecode --enable/disable-library-native This scheme seems mostly fine. Package maintainers can do multiple passes building exactly what they want on each pass. People compiling from source can just enable everything they want and build in a single pass. So, I have three questions: (1) Flag sanity checking Not all combinations of flags are sensible. For example, we can already specify: --disable-library-profiling --enable-executable-profiling Which will probably fail unless the executable does not depend on the libraries. These new flags would introduce further nonsense, such as: --enable-library-for-ghci --disable-library-vanilla That will fail because --enable-library-for-ghci requires building the vanilla libraries. The current code processes the flags in isolation -- so detecting conflicts will be a moderate change to the existing code. But I think it is the right thing to do, anyone disagree? (2) Is there a better set of flags Perhaps my problem is that I am using the wrong abstraction for the flags. Is there a different set of flags that would solve my problem with out introducing incompatible combinations? (3) Another name for vanilla libraries I need a name to describe libraries that are built without any 'special' flags like -prof or -parallel. Currently I am using --enable/disable-library-vanilla, but I think there might be a better choice. Other ideas are 'default', 'plain', or 'standard'. Thanks! j.