[Haskell-cafe] Packages

[Andrew Coppin]

Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Sep 2008 23:38:16 -0700
> Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> And by now you know where which distro has it:
>>     
>>     http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=18343
>>     
>
> I'm sorry, Don, but you're late... Gentoo had it last night (as soon as Matthew
> told me he uploaded it to Hackage)! ;-)
>   

I'm sorry, I'm confused...

1. How is putting something into a Cabal package different from just 
handing somebody the source code and telling them to run ghc --make?

2. If we already have a Cabal package, why do we also need seperate 
packages for Arch, Gentoo, Debian...? Isn't Cabal cross-platform?

3. Why isn't any of this explained in print anywhere?