prevent my library from 'exporting' a dependency in maven, but still have it in runtime classpath

Question

My library, call it my-util-lib, uses slf4j as the logging facade. I need a concrete slf4j binding at runtime when I use my library directly, but I don't want the binding jar to be 'inherited' when an application imports my-util-lib. I know I can declare the dependency scope as 'test' in the POM of my-util-lib to accomplish this, but then I cannot run my library directly, other than in JUnit tests. Like if I want to run a main() method from one of my util classes for some quick-n-dirty purpose or quick test. Is there a way to accomplish this? Or to force the scope of a run to 'test' when not running a JUnit test?

Answer 1

Set

<scope>provided</scope

on the <dependency> to slf4j.

For a discussion of the values of scope, see this question: What's the difference between these Maven dependency scopes: provided/compile/system/