What's the latest opinion whether things should be marked "provided" in the pom? I've changed my mind on this a few times, myself, so I'm curious what others think.
The provided scope means that it will not propagate as a transitive dependency. Other than that, it doesn't do much... though we can control packaging based on provided or not. I'm not sure this gets us much, and it's inconvenient for users. We can control packaging in other ways (like being more explicit and carefully considering which dependencies we include in an RPM or tarball, for instance). If we drop its declaration, what this means, is that if users want to build with Accumulo as a dependency, but against a different version of Hadoop than what we declare in our POM, they'll have to explicitly <exclude> the hadoop dependencies, and redeclare them, or they will have to use their <dependencyManagement> section to force a particular dependency of hadoop. The advantage to users, though, if we drop this, is that they won't have to constantly re-declare transitive dependencies to get their projects to build/test/run. See http://s.apache.org/maven-dependency-scopes Thoughts? -- Christopher L Tubbs II http://gravatar.com/ctubbsii
