Cannot override plugin dependencies in maven 2.0.9

• Complexity:

  Intermediate

When an attempt is made to override the version of torque-templates used by the maven-torque-plugin as below, maven still tries to use the original version of the torque-templates jar. The overridden jar is ignored.

According to http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-2972, this behaviour used to be broken in maven v2.0.8 and earlier, and was apparently fixed. This doesn't seem to be the case though.

The configuration looks like this:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.torque</groupId>
  <artifactId>torque-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>3.3</version>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.apache.derby</groupId>
      <artifactId>derby</artifactId>
      <version>10.4.1.3</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.apache.torque</groupId>
      <artifactId>torque-templates</artifactId>
      <version>3.3.1</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</plugin>

The original torque-templates jar is v3.3. The overridden torque-templates jar is v3.3.1.

As the plugin gives no clues as to which version is being used, I deleted the original torque-templates v3.3 release from the local repository. What I expected to see was maven ignoring the v3.3 jar and using the v3.3.1 jar instead, but maven tries to re-download the v3.3 release and use it instead.

maven-torque-plugin depends on torque-gen, which in turn depends on torque-templates. It may be that direct plugin dependencies can be overridden, but transitive plugin dependencies cannot be overridden.