Hi Henning,
The name does not have to be pkgname.cabal. You can choose any name with extension .cabal. Cabal complains about multiple files with that extension.
duh, I didn't know that! I assumed that the "foo" part in "foo.cabal" is significant in some way, but apparently it's not.
So you could in principle call it description.cabal consistently in all your packages.
Is it also possible to use a package-specific name for Setup.hs? If I'd be writing a package called "foo", could I use the name "foo.cabal" and "foo.setup" to designate my build instructions? I'd also be happy to call the "Setup.hs" file "Setup-foo.hs" or "Foo-setup.hs" or whatever, as long as there's a package-specific component in the name that matches the one I used for the Cabal file. If that were the case, then multiple packages could be stored in one directory, and a build call like cabal configure --package=foo would be unambiguous. Take care, Peter