Shipments in Cabal

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| I started off from the assumption that "shipments" are necessary and
| obviously beneficial. However after thinking about it for a while and
| thinking through some of the implications (especially on dependency
| resolution) I'm not not so convinced that we need shipments as such.

I have not been following this thread much, but my original
understanding was precisely that

	A Cabal package *is* the unit of distribution
	Indeed, that's what it is for

I'm entirely unclear why new need some other larger unit.  Yes, a Cabal
package may depend on other Cabal package, but those dependencies are
explicit in the package descr file, and Cabal-get can follow the links.
Any larger unit (shipments) will also have dependencies that need to be
followed, in just the same way, so I don't understand what has been
gained.  

I'm probably missing something, but perhaps someone can write down the
reasoning on Duncan's Wiki page?
http://haskell.org/hawiki/Cabal_2fMultiPackageDistributables

Simon