To be even more explicit,  the HTTP client is cabal-install,  which is a program that downloads and compiles code from the Hackage public source code repository for Haskell.    cabal-install is HTTP only,  whereas Hackage supports both HTTP and HTTPS.    I _could_ modify cabal-install,  as it is free, libre, and open source software,   but for reasons both good and bad,  getting the changes pushed upstream is problematic.   So I was curious about finding a quick workaround for those concerned about possible MITM attacks injecting malicious code into the packages,  and came up with the idea of a stunnel or nginx proxy.    (Some of the people who run Hackage are working on code signing,  but who knows when that'll finally be available...)

Perhaps the man page would make a little bit more sense to me on this count if I had a better understanding of the TLS protocol and how it relates to https,   but that's not something I honestly know all that much about.    As it stands the man page is a bit opaque to me on this topic...

Best,

Leon