Partly by way of experiment with darcs and Cabal and partly because I am restructuring the cryptographic library, I have set up a Codec package with some utilities in it, see http://www.haskell.org/Codec/index.html. Currently it contains only the module Codec.Utils. To get the package: darcs get http://www.haskell.org/Codec To build, you need the Cabal libraries installed: ghc -package Setup.lhs -o setup -package Cabal ./setup configure ./setup build ./setup install The latter needs to be done as root. base64 encoding / decoding should probably be included in Codec.Utils (I've seen copies of the same code all over the place) and if anyone has the time, they are very welcome to add it. I'd also welcome feedback on whether this is the right place in the hierarchy for such a package and modules. Finally, I don't want to tread on any toes and if anyone feels that this is their area then I would be happy to hand this over and submit it as a contribution. Dominic. PS I'd also like to thank the darcs and Cabal teams for their tools.