He's a hardcore Debian guy. I'm sure that if he needs a custom build he probably farms out the compilation to one of his remote servers, and just downloads the resultant .deb file.

Not sure I understand, ghc/platform is hundreds of MB iirc, remotely built or not. Or maybe you meant a tailored ghc distro without all the statically compiled libs and such ?

I assumed that you were referring to compilation time on his netbook, but I guess you were referring to download time over dial-up?

Exactly, now we're both in sync.

I assume that he probably doesn't have to compile GHC all that often. He can probably just drive to the nearest place with free Wifi and download whatever he needs over a faster connection.