finding the dependecies of cabal packages

[Duncan Coutts]

Hi all,

Over in Gentoo packaging land we're trying to build tools to automate
the process of packaging cabal packages. ("package" is far to much of an
overlaoded word!)

So we have a tool "cabal2ebuild" which will produce an ebuild from a
cabal file. An ebuild is a text file that contains all the information
that the Gentoo packaging system needs to be able to install the
program/library in question.

In particular the ebuild must list all the dependencies of the package.
Required Haskell libraries are listed in the "build-depends:" field in
the cabal file, so that one is easy. However it is not clear how to find
out the build tools that the cabal package requires.

For example packages may require alex or happy or c2hs or other build
time tools. Is there any better way to find if these tools are needed
than to look through the source tree for any files with the appropriate
extensions ".y", ".x", ".chs" etc?

Duncan