grossdepends

Grossdepends is a term used in software engineering to describe a metric that counts the dependencies of a software artifact, including transitive dependencies and, in some usages, multiplicities along dependency paths. It is used to gauge the raw maintenance burden and exposure to upstream libraries before any deduplication or resolution.

The term is informal and its exact definition varies by project or tooling. It does not correspond to a formal standard, but it appears in blog posts, talks, and discussions about dependency graphs and risk assessment.

Definition and interpretation: The most common interpretation treats grossdepends as the raw expanded dependency graph with multiplicities preserved. That is, after resolving all direct and transitive dependencies, one counts each edge from a package to its dependency as a unit. This yields a numeric value that can be large for projects with many transitive links. By contrast, net transitive dependencies (a related concept) counts the unique packages in the transitive closure, ignoring multiple occurrences across paths.

Example: Consider a project where direct dependencies are B and C; B depends on D; C depends on D and E. The grossdepends metric would count five dependency edges: A→B, A→C, B→D, C→D, C→E. The set of unique transitive dependencies would be {B, C, D, E}, which is four.

Usage and tooling: Grossdepends can be computed via build tooling or custom scripts that expand the dependency graph. Many ecosystems offer dependency tree or graph analyses, which teams can adapt to report grossdepends alongside net dependency metrics. This helps assess potential maintenance burden and vulnerability exposure in large dependency graphs.

See also: Transitive dependency, Dependency graph, Dependency management, Dependency hell.