+1 for Carter's proposal - I had actually been planning to make the same suggestion, but just saw this thread now...

On 27 January 2014 09:39, Austin Seipp <austin@well-typed.com> wrote:
As for shipping with GHC itself: this is technically possible, but
slightly annoying to implement, and it also makes the build processes
for a release slightly more annoying (which is mostly my problem.) But
it is all doable. However, keep in mind I *do not* maintain the binary
distributions for everything, nor do Cabal devs have access to all
hardware - so all people making upstream releases for their platforms
(i.e. Solaris, PowerPC, ARM/Linux, etc) must also package cabal
themselves. But perhaps that's not a huge deal.

If ghc provided cabal-install I would be happy to ship that in Fedora
instead of a separate package.  To me cabal-install is probably the most
important tool/package in HP (except for ghc itself of course): many people
build/bootstrap latest ghc themselves it seems and so providing
the latest cabal-install out of the box too would be a big win IMO,
making it much easier to test ghc.  (I wouldn't even mind if ghc
shipped cabal-install's dependencies too.)

Jens

ps Of course it could be made a configure option whether to build
cabal-install or now: the cabal-install source is already there. ;) :)