Is gradle suitable for this purpose: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11923611/dag-build-system-that-can-handle-constraints-like-deprecated-conflicts-with ? Can i make a ‘gradle dsl’, where the cruft i don’t need or want like ant/eclipse/whatever support is cut? Embeed the parser in somewhere else (for instance a netbeans platform app)?
Rip out the maven dependency resolver and replace that for a homebrew thing? (Or more likely, nothing since mods are not famous for their metadata). Can i drive the gradle tool from java code, for instance iterate over the targets of a .gradle file, show the problems, draw the DAG, create a dag dynamically, etc? Does gradle check that the build file is a DAG and there are no circular dependencies? Could i select individual tasks of the whole file for consideration for the DAG? (since it’s likely the original data has circular dependencies but they are marked as ‘incompatible’ so the circularity is broken.