Cabal and external dependencies

[Jim Burton]

Is cabal capable of detecting missing external deps, e.g. for packages
that provide bindings? Does this depend
on package authors and some use of a config script seperate to .cabal?
I'm just curious because I ran into this just now -- I tried to
install dons' hackage-sparklines with cabal-install today (whilst reading
his blog post about the same) which failed, in a way that seemed
cryptic at first. I needed to notice that it was gd which failed and
guess that I should install the libgd dev files. It's obvious
that I would need these, you might say, but it certainly has the
potential to confuse people... 

Jim