Hi John Lin,
The Maven Dependency Plugin offers analyses to detect dependencies that are used and undeclared; unused and declared. I think that's what you're asking for. It is one of the tools to really nail down correctness of dependencies (the Maven Enforcer Plugin also has some relevant rules, such as dependency convergence). I have used these on larger projects, where dependency management had inherently gotten quite a bit riskier (risky in the sense that things tended to break when someone casually changed a dependency version). These tools were valuable, but they also came with a price of being forced to chase down dependency issues that the tool rightfully asserted, that didn't have any practical impact on the application. In projects with good test coverage (for me those tend to be smaller projects) I have never used tools like this, because if a high quality test suite succeeds with an imperfect dependency tree, the team is still delivering working software. As always, there's tradeofs, and you make the decision for your project. Good luck. Sander. https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-dependency-plugin/analyze-mojo.html https://maven.apache.org/enforcer/enforcer-rules/index.html Sander Verhagen [ [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> ] On 10/01/2019 00:51, ??? wrote: Hi, I feel a bit uncomfortable with using the classes in transitive dependencies. For example, my project A depends on other project B, and project B depends on project C. When I directly use the classes of projects C in my project A, I expected that Maven would throw a warning on it, since project B may someday remove or update the version of the dependency of project C. However, it complains nothing. It makes me wonder what's Maven's recommendation for such scenario. After reading the tutorial on https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-dependency-mechanism.html, I still couldn't find out what Maven suggests. When I use a class in my project, is it a better practice to specify the project containing the class as a direct dependency, or just let the transitive dependency do its job? What's the catch? Thanks! Best, John Lin
