cabal (./Setup.hs) options

[Johan Tibell]

Before I start hacking on something I thought I'd do a little survey
on the current state of affairs. There's a lot of different stuff "out
there" and I'm a bit confused about the purpose of each:

* Cabal
* cabal-get (dead?)
* cabal-install
* cabal-put
* Hackage
* HackageDB

I would appreciate if someone could give a short summary of each (with
purpose). The picture I got this far is that Cabal is like make but
with some extra information (.cabal file) attached so packages can be
retrieved from HackageDB. Does this mean that Cabal/Hackage are a bit
like Gentoo Portage which fetches and compiles sources? You can
probably tell that I'm confused.

- Do all these tools work with sources or is there such a thing a
binary packaging?
- What handles dependencies?
- Is there some sort of installed packages DB already (which could be
extended with uninstall information)?
- Are there any tools for making distribution specific (e.g. deb, rpm) packages?