There are several issues at hand.

One is the automatic resolution. Say one transitive dependency depends upon foo-1.xyz and another depend upon foo-1.zyx, where “xyz” and “zyx” cannot be automatically sorted out. There needs to be a common versioning scheme. For instance, do libs use major.minor.bugfix or only major.minor, some write stuff like “-ga”, “-final”, “-alpha”, “-beta”, or “1.3b2″.

Then there is the problem of a dependency being found in more than one place in the repository. Some are released under two different groupIds, which can make two transitive dependencies include the same jar in same version with different names.

Another one is with spring. You can depend on “spring-full” (includes all) or spring-foo, spring-bar, … Now, one transitive dependency can depend upon spring-foo-2.0.jar and another transitive dependency can depend upon spring-bar-2.5.jar. Not a good match, when deployed in “lib” in the same war.

The two cases above are special cases of A badly packaged project will break builds.

There is also the problem of excluding transitive dependencies, where you need to know and specify ALL you do not want.

Some of these are not mavens fault, but more the fact, that automatic, transitive dependency management is very hard to get right. I, personally, think we need more rules enforced in the repository, to be able to get a good implementation on top of it. It needs to be streamlined even more than it is today.