RE: Text.ParserCombinators.Parsec requires -package text.

| Why is it necessary to provide -package options at all?
| 
| ghc-pkg knows about all the packages in your system so it could just
| implicitly add -package $x for every package when compiling or
linking.

That's exactly what I think.  Currently we require the -package flags
when linking solely for efficiency reasons: linking would be slow if ld
was given every lib.a file installed for that compiler.  But perhaps
that should be the default, which is overridden if you give a bunch of
-package flags in the link command.  That would make more sense to me.

Simon