The Spring Boot project provides a set of "Starter <http://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/1.5.1.RELEASE/reference/htmlsingle/#using-boot-starter>" dependencies. Per Spring Boot's documentation:
Starters are a set of convenient dependency descriptors that you can include in your application. You get a one-stop-shop for all the Spring and related technology that you need, without having to hunt through sample code and copy paste loads of dependency descriptors. For example, if you want to get started using Spring and JPA for database access, just include the spring-boot-starter-data-jpa dependency in your project, and you are good to go. The starters contain a lot of the dependencies that you need to get a project up and running quickly and with a consistent, supported set of managed transitive dependencies. >From this documentation and elsewhere it seems clear that the starter dependencies are intended to transitively bring in numerous other dependencies to be used at both runtime and compile. Using this mechanism to transitively bring in compile-scoped dependencies seems to be at odds with the intent of how Maven officially intends them to be used. Per the Maven documentation <https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-dependency-mechanism.html#Dependency_Scope>, it is intended that transitive dependencies of compile-scoped dependencies be the runtime scope, and that all compile dependencies should be explicitly listed: it is intended that [transitive dependencies of compile-scoped dependencies] should be runtime scope instead, so that all compile dependencies must be explicitly listed - however, there is the case where the library you depend on extends a class from another library, forcing you to have available [sic] at compile time. For this reason, compile time dependencies remain as compile scope even when they are transitive. Using the dependency:analyze <https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-dependency-plugin/analyze-mojo.html> goal makes this misuse extra clear (as I mentioned in a still-unanswered Stack Overflow question <https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27994153> from two years ago). I am reading things correctly that Spring Boot is misusing this feature, correct? Is there a "correct" way that this functionality — conveniently providing a set of dependencies at set known versions with a single simple Maven configuration — would better be implemented? Is this something that Maven's own dependency mechanism should be extended to allow for (perhaps with a new dependency scope), or perhaps something better served by a custom Maven plugin? Is this something where the realities of transitive dependencies have changed such that the Maven documentation is no longer accurate and relevant? Or is this "not that big of a deal" that one of the major Java frameworks is misusing its build tool in this manner?
