If you want to hack on Cabal, don't be intimidated! Read the guide to the source code: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/wiki/Source-Guide Subscribe to the mailing list: http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/cabal-devel Browse the list of open issues: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues There are other resources listed on the dev wiki: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/wiki http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ (old wiki) In particular, the open tickets and the cabal-devel mailing list which is a good place to ask questions. Dependencies policy ------------------- Cabal's policy is to support being built by versions of GHC that are up to 3 years old.