Maven 2 & 3

this is by design, since the war already includes its dependences. Why do you need them?

I need dependencies of war because in continuum-core-it i use plexus.xml/components.xml of continuum-webapp, so some components decleare in them are in war dependencies and i don't want to add these deps in continuum-core-it pom.
I'm satisfied to declare the packaging of continuum-webapp to pom in continuum-core-it, because the war doesn't must be in the classpath.
I just view this pb with war dependency and personnaly, i prefer to use the pom packaging, so you can close this issue if you want

EARs bundling multiple WARs have a need to be able to resolve and bundle transitive dependency to reduce overall WAR size. ("skinny WARs")

Brett, another use case: overlays.

You have a dependency on a war that contains classes you need to compile your project. Adding the war as an overlay of the war project should be enough to resolve its classes (and maybe associated libs)

We're packaging a standalone Jetty server in a zip with the assembly and appassembler plugin. This project has a dependency on two skinny war-projects, and thus need to resolve the transitive dependencies and include them in the zip.

From issues I have seen this is reported as problems with both the war and ear plugin, but seems to be a broader issue on how to resolve dependencies when the type is war.

Duplicating the dependency, just as a type=pom made the appassembler include the needed libraries. It's not the best way to do it, but might be an acceptable way for my use case.

I believe the J2EE/JavaEE specifications designate packaging to an 'assembler' role for good reason. The code for web module and resource adapters (a real connector, not simply a configured JDBC pool) are managed well as plain jars. Dependencies are satisfied by external jars, and you have fine grained control over reuse. IMHO, making wars, rars, and ears first-class maven citizens seems a bit strange. The way you package them changes on the environment, Appserver, et cetera. The compiled code doesn't change.

I have used the rar, ear and war plugins to build both skinny and full-fledged components. I can appreciate why you would want to package the full fledged components (at least war and rar) because they are reusable components much like the jar. They are intended to be boxed up and reused. However, these components imply configuration and repackaging (Class-Path entries in the manifests of modules, moving jars to ear-level, changing init-params, configuring security, adding appserver specific descriptors, etc). This seems to indicate that they are not artifacts in the traditional maven sense. They are not static like jars, so storing them as such doesn't make much sense. It may not make sense to store them with the jar dependencies bundled; this is like storing uberjars all over the place. Perhaps the realization of an war/ear with dependencies is better deferred?

Wars and rars are ideally treated as components. So it may make sense to store them with their external dependencies. However, I believe dependency meta data could be used. This would perhaps be something like a dependency scope 'aggregate'? It would imply that transitivity blocks at the artifact that aggregates them. Unfortunately, if dependency meta data isn't available to dependent artifacts you can no longer identify or resolve conflicts, et cetera. If you could use this meta data, then you could perhaps control the ultimate fate of the dependencies through something like dependencyManagement. It may be enough information for an intelligent assembly plugin to realize the aggregate dependencies and patch up bundled modules with Class-Path manifest entries, et cetera.

Note: The maven warpath plugin (http://static.appfuse.org/maven-warpath-plugin/) provides a workaround to this issue. I tried it out, and it worked nicely for me.

we work with skinny wars a lot and we got use to declare also a dependency to the pom of the war. By doing this you get all dependencies resolved and retrieved to the WEB-INF/lib dir.

I've created a separate issue for the overlay case, since the resolution for that will probably be different from resolving the skinny WAR use case, and shouldn't need any additional configuration. See MWAR-253