It appears that the guix cabal parser (in guix/import/cabal.scm) isn’t aware of `common` stanzas.
https://www.haskell.org/cabal/users-guide/developing-packages.html#pkg-section-common-common Note that there’s quite a few issues with the cabal parser, and the format is pretty baroque, to the extent that I wonder whether it wouldn’t be better to delegate the parsing to cabal itself. E.g.: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=35743 https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=36690 I also remember some issue with braces instead of indentation, but can’t find a bug report right now.