There are a couple of peculiarities of Haskell's module system which made it difficult, but yes, I agree that it took longer than it should have.

However, nowadays there is a decent dependency management and build tool! It's called "stack", as in "stack install xmonad". I never once had any dependency or other compile problems with stack. It simply always works. :-)

I've had a lot of problems with Stack whenever I'm doing non-trivial (that is, beyond just "build this executable the standard way") kinds of tasks—in particular, it tends to corrupt its package DB after a while for mysterious reasons, and you have to blow it away and rebuild, and it can be a nightmare to do certain bits of configuration where the UI is undocumented or nonexistant—but it's a pretty big step up from historical Cabal.

There's also an already-working-but-still-not-quite-finished alternative system within Cabal which is eventually gonna become the default one, and which does builds in a Nix-inspired way. I've been using that for the better part of a year now, and I like it far better than either historical Cabal or Stack: http://blog.ezyang.com/2016/05/announcing-cabal-new-build-ni...

> it tends to corrupt its package DB after a while for mysterious reasons, and you have to blow it away and rebuild

Odd, I've been using stack in anger for a while now and have never had that happen. Have you reported a bug? Any ideas about reproduction?

I didn't ever figure out a minimal reproduction, but I also should be clear that that was my experience using Stack at the time: I haven't used it in more than a year (I jumped ship to new-build as soon as it was first available and haven't looked back) so those problems might have been alleviated since then.