On Friday 08 September 2006 06:15, David Leangen wrote:
> Can I ask yet another basic question?
>
> What is a "transitive" dependency? When it's not transitive, what is it,
> intransitive?
>
> Is this "transitive" in the same sense as a transitive verb? Like:
>
>   I am programming (v)
>   I program OSGi stuff (vtr)

I don't know who came up with the term. McConnell was the first one to mention 
it to me.

A dependsOn B
B dependsOn C

So, from A's perspective C is a transitive dependency. Something it is not 
directly depending on. 
A better term would probably been "indirect dependency", but I guess we are 
stuck with this.

Unfortunately, I think that most build systems also handles this wrongly. A 
transitive dependency should NOT be part of the compile path, and only for 
runtime and test paths. Otherwise it is possible that my code stop working 
when a dependent project removes something that I use indirectly (without 
realizing it).

Cheers
Niclas

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