[curious_man]

I still don't understand why dependencies don't belong to the repo. My naive reasoning: I just have to clone the repo and bam, I already have all the dependecies needed to build the artifact. When I need to upgrade to a new version of a library, I only have to commit a new version and delete the old one (possibly integrating the new library in a separate branch if the process is not trivial).

Can you elaborate a bit more on this?

[undees]

If you use something like Git submodules, Mercurial subrepos, or Subversion externals, you can get the best of both worlds. Your repo contains just your code, but a fresh clone will set up dependencies automatically.

I've also seen really simple projects get by with just an "install_deps" task in the Makefile, which you run first thing on a new clone. ("The simplicity of Maven meets the dependency management of Make," the wags will say.)

[curious_man]

Sure, this is a solution. But my confusion remains: why I should't put all these dependencies in the repository with the code that uses them? In the end, doing so I have (almost) all I need to produce the intended software artifact.