This is my experience as well, and the person who maintains "ghc/cabal-install/and the other haskell packages in [extra]" had a similar sentiment in a reddit th

This is my experience as well, and the person who maintains "ghc/cabal-install/and the other haskell packages in [extra]" had a similar sentiment in a reddit thread[1] eight months ago. Cabal is able to give you enough headaches on its own. :-) I do love pacman and the Arch package database in most other regards, however. [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1f26hg/why_does_haskell_suck_on_arch/ca6wt0c