Cabal spelunking considered tricky

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

As I've been maintaining cabal-rpm to try to keep up with developments
in Cabal, I've found myself wondering why it's not using many of the
usual tricks to hide the plumbing, such as a custom monad transformer stack.

Some parameters, such as flags, compiler info, and package descriptions,
pop up simply all over the place, and they're passed around explicitly.
 This seems a smidge peculiar.  A couple of days with a crowbar and
ReaderT StateT IO would do wonders for readability, if anyone feels so
inclined :-)

	<b