Depends is a project I started to automate the handling of Java
library dependencies (circa 2002 when Ant was youthful and Maven was
still in its infancy).

I actually ran the design of Depends by the Ant and Maven guys on one
of the Apache mailing lists, but they rambled on about a bunch of NIH
stuff and didn't want to talk.

Unfortunately, I got distracted with other things and it took many
years before sanity once again prevailed (somewhat anyway) with the
creation of the Ivy project.

Thus what you see here is, at best, a historical curiosity.