Jordi Boggiano has a new post to his site about a recent update to the Composer tool that can help make managing development-only dependencies a bit easier.

Using require-dev in Composer you can declare the dependencies you need for development/testing. It works in most simple cases, but when the dev dependencies overlap with the regular ones, it can get tricky to handle. In too many cases it also tends to just fail at resolving dependencies with quite strange error messages. Since this was quite unreliable, I set out to rework the whole feature this week-end. The patch has been merged, and it fixes six open issues which is great.

Additionally, to make it easier to work with the development dependencies, they'll by default be installed when you run an "update" in your repository. If you don't want them, you can still use "--no-dev". Also, Composer will manage them in a seperate section from the normal "require" packages. If you're not using Composer to manage your application's dependencies, look over on getcomposer.org for more details.