So I want to install GHC + cabal on a new system, building cabal packages with profiling and documentation. Here's what I have to do: 1. Download, unpack and install GHC. 2. Download and unpack cabal-install, and run bootstrap.sh. As part of the bootstrap, it will download and build a bunch of packages. 3. Delete the downloaded packages ("rm -rf ~/.ghc/*") because they were built without profiling or documentation. 4. Call "cabal update" to get a default .cabal/config file. 5. Edit .cabal/config to switch on library-profiling, executable-profiling, and documentation. 6. Build my stuff. This would be much simplified if binary versions of cabal-install were available. (It would be even simpler if they were just included in the GHC builds -- I could eliminate 2 & 3.) -- Ashley Yakeley