Dependency guessing for cabal init

[Jason Dagit]

On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 1:29 PM, Brent Yorgey <byorgey at seas.upenn.edu> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm working on some improvements to 'cabal init', the biggest of which
> is looking at imports in source files to guess an initial list of
> dependencies to populate the 'Build-depends:' field.  I wanted to get
> some feedback on a design decision: what to do when we find multiple
> packages providing the same module?

While cabal init is something I use, I would prefer to have a separate
tool for calculating my build-depends field.  Something that could
suggest things for an existing cabal project, ideally.  Then I could
run that regularly during development to help me determine what my
build-deps should be and cabal init could suggest I run it (or run it
for me).

While I'm suggesting features I would like, wouldn't it be great if
cabal used the plugin RFC that Simon came up with?
http://www.mail-archive.com/haskell-cafe@haskell.org/msg92770.html

I think that interface is a great way to unify the tools that have
sprung up around cabal such as cabal-dev and cab.

> I suppose (b) seems most sensible.

I concur.

Jason