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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T01:13:27+00:00

Let’s say I have four projects: Project A (has a dependency on B and

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Let’s say I have four projects:

  • Project A (has a dependency on B and D)
  • Project B (has a dependency on D)
  • Project C (has a dependency on D)
  • Project D

In this scenario if I run project A, Maven will correctly resolve the dependency to D. If I understand this correctly Maven always takes the dependency with the shortest path. Since D is a direct dependency of A it will be used rather then, the D which is specified within B.

But now assume this structure:

  • Project A (has a dependency on B and C)
  • Project B (has a dependency on D)
  • Project C (has a dependency on D)
  • Project D

In this case the paths to resolving D have the same depth. What happens is that Maven will have a conflict. I know that it is possible to tell Maven that he should exclude dependencies. But my question is how to address such kind of problems. I mean in a real world application you have a lot of dependencies and possibly a lot of conflicts as well.

Is the best practice solution really to exclude stuff or are there other possible solutions to this? I find it very hard to deal with when i suddenly get a ClassNotFound Exception because some versions have changed, which caused Maven to take a different dependency. Of course, knowing this fact makes it a little bit easier to guess that the problem is a dependency conflict.

I’m using maven 2.1-SNAPSHOT.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The maven way of resolving situations like this is to include a <dependencyManagement> section in your project’s root pom, where you specify which version of which library will be used.

    EDIT:

    <dependencyManagement>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>foo</groupId>
        <artifactId>bar</artifactId>
        <version>1.2.3</version>
    </dependency>
   </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

    Now no matter which version of library foo:bar is requested by a dependency, version 1.2.3 will always be used for this project and all sub-projects.

    Reference:

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