Before I start hacking on something I thought I'd do a little survey on the current state of affairs. There's a lot of different stuff "out there" and I'm a bit confused about the purpose of each: * Cabal * cabal-get (dead?) * cabal-install * cabal-put * Hackage * HackageDB I would appreciate if someone could give a short summary of each (with purpose). The picture I got this far is that Cabal is like make but with some extra information (.cabal file) attached so packages can be retrieved from HackageDB. Does this mean that Cabal/Hackage are a bit like Gentoo Portage which fetches and compiles sources? You can probably tell that I'm confused. - Do all these tools work with sources or is there such a thing a binary packaging? - What handles dependencies? - Is there some sort of installed packages DB already (which could be extended with uninstall information)? - Are there any tools for making distribution specific (e.g. deb, rpm) packages?