Anyway, after talking this over with my colleague, I realize that the problem of *deriving* dependencies is fundamentally undecidable. We might be able to figure it out in the case of simple acquisition, like <span tal:replace="here/aObject/aMethod"/> But it is hopeless for pure python:
<span tal:replace="python:I-can-do-anything-and-you-cant-stop-me(REQUEST)"/> :)
Well you could, in theory, hook every object as CallProfiler does and then you would know for each request what object was called and Cache it. You could even do something really clever like using CallProfiler automatically cache objects that took longer than a certain amount of time... But there are more issues with that than there are days in a year and you could be writing that code forever, letting the user figure it out manually is an easier choice. Cheers. -- Andy McKay