While I agree unreservedly with this, it's probably worth pointing out for the benefit of those who haven't gone through the process themselves that bootstrappi

While I agree unreservedly with this, it's probably worth pointing out for the benefit of those who haven't gone through the process themselves that bootstrapping cabal-install is a five-minute job (or less, depending on how many dependencies you need to compile). The barrier is that one needs to look up the instructions, and know that one should be looking looking something up, rather than it being in any way difficult or complex. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Cabal-Install http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Cabal-Install