DependencyManagement should allow <replaceWith> to manage use of re-named, woven, instrumented or compatible artifacts

[if only this was a later version of JIRA I'd have not lost all of what I just typed, as I could use Mylyn instead of the web UI. here goes again...]

The challenge of using a different artifact instead of the one that is specified in a POM that you are consuming is not an easy one.

Examples where this hits uses is:

• the artifact name and packaging changes that Spring made at 2.5.6A (which was a big improvement)
• wanting to use SLF4J instead of Apache commons logging (i.e. use something that provides the same API, but is an entirely different project)
• wanting to use your own derivation of a public artifact
• wanting to use a woven/instrumented version of a public artifact

The current approach to replacing, say org.springframework : spring-beans with org.springframework : org.springframework.beans is to do ('scuse the shorthand):

<dependencyManagement>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>com.sun.jersey.contribs</groupId>
      <artifactId>jersey-spring</artifactId>
      <exclusions> 
           org.springframework : spring-beans
      </exclusions>
    </dependency>
    ... repeat for every artifact that uses spring-beans, and then add more if adding another artifact
  </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

to exclude it, and then globally include the replacement using:

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
    <artifactid>org.springframework.beans</groupId>
    <version>${spring.version}</version>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

This is error prone, and could be made far easier by an extension to dependencies, which would remove the need to know what artifacts (jersey-spring in the above example) use the artifact that you are replacing. Here's how it would look:

<dependencyManagement>
  <!-- this declares the version we want to use if this artifact is in use -->
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
      <artifactid>org.springframework.beans</groupId>
      <version>${spring.version}</version>
    </dependency>

    <!-- This deals with artifact name change -->
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
      <artifactid>spring-beans</groupId>
      <replaceWith>  <!-- list of dependency elements -->
          <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactid>org.springframework.beans</groupId>
          </dependency>
          <!-- more dependency elements could be added here if an artifact has been split -->
      </replaceWith>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

NOTE:

• Nothing is specified in <dependencies> so no artifacts are globally added where they may not be needed. This means we can develop a project wide parent pom.xml.
• Artifacts can have been split and merged
• Derived artifacts, such as instrumented ones can easily be substituted, and could be selectively substituted using profiles.