A

Dependency

in SDF is an object that is not defined in the project, but the project requires in order to function properly. Dependencies can be required or optional, as defined in

manifest.xml

. An SDF project will only create/update Objects that are actually defined within the project, which requires an XML definition within

Objects/

. It will not create/update any Dependencies.

so I was thinking kind of along those lines and then tried commenting out all the objects portion of the manifest.xml. but then when deploying if custom record A had a select field that is populated with custom record B, even though all of which are in my SDF xmls it ran into a dependency error saying record B does not exist in account

Got it

yes, essentially that is what I ended up doing manually in my deploy.xml and deploying things iteratively until no deploy errors were encountered

I'm sure that's the intention

alright that information all helps definitely, just wanted to make sure it wasn't something I was doing explicitly wrong to make my life difficult. thanks!