[Haskell-cafe] Can cabal be turned into a package manager?

[Janek S.]

In the recent months there was a lot of dicussion about cabal, dependency hell and alike. After 
reading some of these discussions there is a question I just have to ask:

Why not create a package manager (like rpm or apt) for Haskell software?

I've been using Linux for years. Software for Linux is mostly written in C and C++. There are 
thousands of libraries with lots of dependencies and yet:
a) Linux distributions manage to have package repositories that are kept in a consistent state
b) Linux package managers can avoid dependency hell, automatically update to new packages, etc.
Linux people did it! Is there any technical issue that prevents Haskell people from doing exactly 
the same thing? Or are we just having non-technical problems like lack of money or developers?

Janek