Learn English – Single word for expressing “those which I am dependent on”

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Is there any single (or near to single) word for expressing those which I am dependent on? I am searching for a dual term to dependent – the other side of the dependency. Something like the interviewer – interviewee pair.

The use case is displaying monitoring information of my web application which would list the status of all the components my application is dependent on.

What I need is a word which may be used as an attribute (ideally an adjective), such as xxx components, xxx databases etc. Then just the plain dependencies is not sufficient as it refers to all the stuff my application is dependent on.

EDIT:

Rathony suggests the word dependee ("An agent that is depended on by a depender… Technical term, not widely used in software engineering outside of agent-oriented programming").

I found the definition of the -ee suffix:

  1. forming nouns:
  2. denoting the person affected directly or indirectly by the action of the formative verb. "employee"
  3. denoting a person described as or concerned with. "absentee"
  4. denoting an object of relatively smaller size. "goatee"

If I apply the definition to dependence, I cannot distinguish on which side of the relationship the "dependee" is.

How does that word sound to a native English (and not touched with agent-oriented programming)? Is it understood according to the above mentioned definition as someone who is "depended on"?

Best Answer

You could consider using dependee as it means:

(programming) An agent that is depended on by a depender, the target of a dependency (used in agent-oriented programming)

There is a usage note:

Technical term, not widely used in software engineering outside of agent-oriented programming but finds some use. In agent-oriented programming the antonym is depender, though in general usage the common term dependent is used instead. There is no common language equivalent for dependee, however – other metaphors are used instead, such as parent/child. The circumlocutions “A depends on B” and “B is depended on by A” are much more common in general use than “A is the depender, B is the dependee”.

[Wiktionary]

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