syntactic sugar for dependency queries

[crazyscot]

I want to ask questions of the form "What packages does package X depend on?" without having to try to remember the byzantine syntax or tangle with the myriad of label types.

$ muddle query depends foo
Bad dependency type: foo
[... help message elided ...]
[... lots of frustration elided ...]
$ muddle query depends all-short package:foo{\*}/preconfig
Dependencies for package:foo{*}/preconfig
-----
package:foo{apps}/preconfig <-MakeBuilder-- [ checkout:foo/checked_out, package:bar{base}/postinstalled, package:baz{libs}/postinstalled, package:host_aptget_pkg{host_aptget_role}/postinstalled, package:qux{support}/postinstalled, package:fred{support}/postinstalled, package:barney{support}/postinstalled ]
package:foo{operational}/preconfig <-MakeBuilder-- [ checkout:foo/checked_out, package:foo{apps}/postinstalled ]

The output is a bit hard to parse as well. I really want the interaction to go more along the lines of:

$ muddle depends foo
bar baz qux fred barney

The dependent packages should probably be alphabetised, or possibly partial-ordered based on dependencies amongst them.