I'm working on a project which has an "optional" transitive dependency. That is: we depend on someone else's artifact (let's call it A), which itself depends *in some circumstances* on a third artifact (from a third source) which I'll call "B". That is: if you never trigger a certain feature of A then it doesn't really need B. A expresses this by making B a dependency with <scope>provided</scope>.
I feel that this is an abuse of the dependency mechanism, and that optional dependencies should not be declared to Maven as dependencies at all. I think that A should use Class.forName to probe for B and (if not found) gracefully explain why it cannot perform the requested function. What do you think? The feature in question is decryption of a file, which is triggered when A recognizes an encrypted file, and that is out of our control. Decryption requires key material, and in our application there is no reasonable opportunity to provide it, so we can't actually make use of the decryption function. We are thus faced with a choice: declare a transitive dependency as if it were a direct dependency, to support an unusable feature, and leave notes all over our POMs to explain why dependency:analyze is wrong and you should not remove this dependency; or keep explaining to people why they get NoClassDefFoundError when processing some of their files. -- Mark H. Wood Lead Technology Analyst University Library Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis 755 W. Michigan Street Indianapolis, IN 46202 317-274-0749 www.ulib.iupui.edu
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