OK - now with a stack.yaml file it's busy getting me a ghci...
cabal hell was one of the first things that really put me off haskell. I was downloading and trying to get xmonad working, but within half an hour, had a completely unusable ghc / xmonad combination. I think I was on debian, and the version of ghc that was installed wasn't compatible with the correct versions of various libs that xmonad wanted to have installed... Very frustrating.
Well, looks like installing stack does at least allow me to get a ghci up and running. That's cool. The easier getting haskell up and running becomes, the better. It's a wacky and esoteric language enough without it being hard to get going...
Interesting how programming languages "need" their own package manager these days. A bit of a pain that there's no universal one for all languages, but I guess that would be just too convenient...