Merkle trees and build systems

There’s no other reliable way to do things, you need the directed property because in the end the computer will need to compute a sequential execution plan, and you need the acyclic property to avoid looping indefinitely in the middle of this plan.

Component systems that break this (for example, when a parent introduces a dependency on its children by testing them in its unit tests) are nor automate-able. They need someone to construct manually a giant pile of poo (vendor) so the computer does not need to resolve the giant poo dependency graph to recreate it from scratch.