Cabal dependency extrema testing

[Henning Thielemann]

On Tue, 11 Jun 2013, Bram Neijt wrote:

> I think it would be interesting to test build a package with the
> "latest" and "oldest" allowed dependencies, to see if the dependency
> boundaries hold. For example, build the text[1] package with version
> 0.2 of test-framework-hunit (oldest allowed according to .cabal file)
> to see if that is still works.

It would be great to have a tool to do this. Maybe it could be just 
another option in cabal-install, like the --constraint option?

> Does anybody know of previous work on that?
> Does anybody have pointers on how to build with a specific version set?
> What is the easiest way to parse the dependencies in the cabal file,
> API pointers are also very much appreciated :)

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/Cabal/1.16.0.3/doc/html/Distribution-PackageDescription-Parse.html