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I have a project A which has a dependency X. Dependency X has an optional dependency Y which doens't get included in A by default. Is there a way to include Y in my POM without explicitly including it? In Ivy they have a way to essentailly say include all optional dependencies of X, does Maven have a way to do this?
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Optional dependencies are used when it's not possible (for whatever reason) to split a project into sub-modules. The idea is that some of the dependencies are only used for certain features in the project and will not be needed if that feature isn't used.
In order to exclude these special dependencies from the main project, we can apply Maven's <optional> tag to them. This forces any user who wants to use those dependencies to declare them explicitly. However, it does not force those dependencies into a project that doesn't need them.
For example, Eclipse has a pom. xml viewer with tabs at the bottom. You can click the tabs on the bottom to explore dependencies, then r click on one and say “exclude”. Eclipse will then prompt you as to where you want to add the exclusion.
Transitive Dependencies. Maven avoids the need to discover and specify the libraries that your own dependencies require by including transitive dependencies automatically. This feature is facilitated by reading the project files of your dependencies from the remote repositories specified.
According to the Maven docs:
Optional dependencies - If project Y depends on project Z, the owner of project Y can mark project Z as an optional dependency, using the "optional" element. When project X depends on project Y, X will depend only on Y and not on Y's optional dependency Z. The owner of project X may then explicitly add a dependency on Z, at her option. (It may be helpful to think of optional dependencies as "excluded by default.")
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