Depends

Depends project is a universal dependency tracker implemented in C. The educational purpose of Depends is significant, as it provides extensive documentation on how the dependency tracker works. This documentation is clear enough for any programmer to understand the implementation and how to implement one themselves.

From a productivity standpoint, Depends is incredibly useful because it implements a complete dependency tracker and an associative container for any given value-type. It can be used without prior knowledge of how it is implemented. While the additional documentation supports productivity, it is not strictly necessary.

Depends was created for an experiment with Jail, an experimental project still in development as of writing. The dependency tracker was initially designed to track dependencies between singleton instances.

Depends grew in functionality as it was improved, debugged, and eventually used in at least one production application. The library continued to develop in the Developer's Corner, and it was finally published as its Maven project on SourceForge on August 8th, 2007.

Depends underwent modifications to follow new coding standards and was added to a proprietary package version manager. A draft of an article detailing how to use a dependency tracker has been incorporated into the documentation for Depends.