By the way, as I've been thinking about Cabal, I remembered this question to which I haven't found an answer. I realize that I haven't been party to the initial discussions, but John Meacham didn't know the answer either, so I will ask it. As I understand it, Cabal is meant to provide people with a compiler-independent way to build Haskell packages. So it (a) builds packages while (b) abstracting over compiler interfaces. Why was the decision made to couple these two functions into a single project? It seems to me that maybe having two separate projects would be more manageable and useful. - The first project would provide a standard command-line interface to Haskell compilers. There would be operations such as: compile a file into an object file (may be a no-op); link a bunch of object files into a package; install a package into the following package database; create an empty package database; merge two package databases; find dependencies of a module. And options like: use the following other packages, search for packages in the following package database. Basically, the things that compilers can do, but given a standard interface. - The second project would provide a build system. I guess there would be a lot of options here. There seems to be a demand for a system with some main declarative specification file which can be processed by external tools to find out what dependencies a project has on other projects, etc., which Cabal is responding to. So perhaps people would write something like this. However, if there were two separate projects, then developers would also have the freedom to use a build system like 'make', or something more sophisticated and unforeseen, with the generic compiler interface as well. By decoupling the standard compiler interface and the build system, one would be able to make improvements independently to each one. Design and development would be faster, users would have more choices, it would be easier to experiment with new versions of each project. So, back to my question. Why couple the two? Frederik -- http://ofb.net/~frederik/