Add option to exclude all transitive dependencies for a particular one

Maven2 is all about dependency management, and transient dependencies are an important part of it. Giving a switch to exclude all the transient dependencies would be an cogent thing to do.

Having been able to obtain transient dependencies is an powerful feature. With the scenarios we have encountered so far, it has been obvious that a some sort of control over transient dependency is a viable solution.

If we could restrict that, Maven2 should look for particular depth in the transient tree, rather than all the way down, it would be a much more valuable thing for the users.

Thus,

<dependency>
...
<transientDepth>1</transientDepth>

</dependency>

Thus, EII transientDepth would contain the depth that the transient resolution framework should look in the transient dependent tree. Value of 1 mean, dependencies in the next level only.

if transientDepth is 0, it is same as <excludeTransitive>true</excludeTransitive>.

We know Maven2 rocks and has addressed many of the building issues. Hope we would get a way to control the transient dependencies as well. (What about 2.0.8 )

Yep, it will be a very nice feature for some specific situations.

I need this. Here is my usecase. I am using an assembly to package the dependencies of my jars into the jar. My web app bootstraps the jars and extracts the dependencies from inside the jar to the web-app's WEB-INF\lib.

My web app depends on these jars and so includes all of their dependencies. So I have to manually exclude them all. And update that exclude each time any of my modules add a new dependency.

I like this idea as well. Useful in the assemblage cases:
http://www.sonatype.com/books/maven-book/reference/assemblies-sect-assembling-via-depend.html

Always years behind Ivy for anything to do with dependency specifications.

I have come across this and found it would be useful as well. The use case for us was all of our projects build normally (EAR + skinny WARs), but when we get to the final deployment, our resulting EAR file contains only the libraries we create. We put all the third party libraries into a shared Java EE library (running WebLogic server) and thus, in the EAR we have to exclude all the transitives from all of our projects It's harsh to have to do it for each and every transitive.

Like the 134 other people who voted for it, I'd love to see this implemented.
There are quite a few bad poms in Central, especially for old artifacts, and they will be here forever.

In case you haven't seen it on MNG-3832, a workaround is to use wildcard on exclusion:

<exclusion>
  <groupId>*</groupId>
  <artifactId>*</artifactId>
</exclusion>

It works in Maven 3, although it produces a nasty warning about threatened build stability and support in future versions.

I guess the fix could simply be to remove this warning...

Ok, I removed the warning messages, please find the patch attached.

I solved it by updating the DefaultModelValidator class so that its ID_REGEX constant would include the '*' character. Also updated its corresponding unit test, DefaultModelValidatorTest.

I also find this "<transientDepth>" idea useful and I'm actually planning to implement it. I will provide updates on my progress.