“Download a Cabal package and all its dependencies recursively, without building anything.”
A fascinating, dangerous, and oddly useful scalpel for your Haskell toolkit. Let’s dissect. What It Actually Does Unlike cabal fetch (which fetches source distributions for dependencies into a shared store) or cabal get (which gets one package’s source), gtools cabal download goes rogue. It recursively crawls the dependency tree from a given package and downloads every .tar.gz source distribution into a local folder, preserving the exact version constraints as resolved by your current cabal.project or snapshot. gtools cabal download
Pro tip: Wrap it in a script that post-processes with cabal-plan for sanity. Or just use cabal build --only-dependencies --dry-run + a custom downloader. But where’s the fun in that? “Download a Cabal package and all its dependencies
“It’s like wget -r for Haskell, except the robot is drunk and forgot to check the map.” It recursively crawls the dependency tree from a