I've got a plugin which is basically doing the same thing that the dependency plugin is, defining artifactItem elements in a configuration, which provide he details for a maven artifact. The version details are filled in just like the dependency plugin. Problem is that I need to take each of those artifactItems and get the transitive dependencies for them... but so far all of my attempts to do so with ArtifactResolver.resolveTransitively() is not working. Should be easy enough to test, just create a new artifact that you know has deps with a ArtifactFactory, then try to get the transitive dependencies. Everytime I try I get an empty set from result.getArtifacts().