Hi Eric,
One more thought: did you check that the logic is the same between Matthew's javahelper and your tool? Is code sharing an option? The worse that could happen to packagers would be different results from those two tools; I can already imagine the mess... ;-)
No. I have not compared the logic of both tools in a systematic way.I however tried out the new tool on a jar that has a build dependency not discovered by java-propose-classpath. (Compare last paragraph of [1]) Both tools didn't show the dependency. So at least they are consistent in that respect. ;-)
As I am using both tools just to facilitate my own packaging work I won't be able to dive in now to find out why the dependency is not discovered. Probably I'll find out sooner or later anyway.
I think both tools have their respective uses in different contexts (one to do broad impact/dependency analysis and one to get a readily usable classpath proposition). If one of the packagers finds different results then I'll certainly help to analyze and interpret the difference.
Florian [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-java/2008/06/msg00042.html