Hello,
currently, there is a strong interdependence between the Wikibase development and Wikidata deployment, which caused and causes friction. Sorry for that.
A suggestion that was made yesterday by Rob was to introduce a build-step for deployment of Wikidata (something ULS already seems to be doing). If done right, this would allow to decouple the way components are split from the way components are deployed.
If I understood it correctly, we would basically have either a deployment module or a deployment branch on an existing module, which (preferably) automatically gathers all dependencies, e.g. into a lib/ or dependency/ folder, or similar, and remains the sole module to be deployed.
There are a number of details to be decided obviously, but I wanted first to gather consensus on whether this is the way forward for the short-term. If so, we would start to work on this very soon.
Cheers, Denny
wikidata-tech@lists.wikimedia.org