With respect to how packages are created, installed and used in Haskell, what is the relationship between ghc-pkg and cabal?
What are their roles - when would you use one, over the other, or use both?
Are they complementary tools, competitive tools, or simply tools that do different jobs?
Graphically, the dependencies are:
Packages GHC can use
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Are registered with "ghc-pkg register"
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And (almost always) built with Cabal
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With build dependencies resolved by cabal-install
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From Hackage.
ghc-pkg is a direct interface to GHC's package database. Cabal is a tool that provides a consistent distribution structure for packages and a way to specify metadata such as dependencies between packages, version numbers, and build information.
Using Cabal to install a package will register it with ghc for you (among other things), but that's the extent of the overlap, really.
Note that ghc-pkg also provides functionality that (as far as I know) Cabal doesn't, such as hiding installed packages.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2706667/what-is-the-relationship-between-ghc-pkg-and-cabal