For apps, particularly IoC managed webapps that use xml configuration, the war projects tend to have a fair number of runtime dependencies listed. There are typically two dependency resolution concerns related to these runtime dependencies:
1 - Specifying unused runtime dependencies clutters the project's pom file and makes the built artifact (such as a war) larger than it needs to be 2 - Configuring an application to use some class at runtime but not providing it as a runtime dependency can cause the application to fail at runtime I've looked over the DefaultProjectDependencyAnalyzer and see that in the "buildDependencyClasses( MavenProject project , Map artifactClassMap )" method it builds up a Set containing strings of class names that are used in the project. I think it should be fairly easy to augment this with a list of additional "RuntimeDependencyClasses" that identify classes that the user specifies are required at runtime - and then when the dependency analyzer runs through it can mark the runtime-scoped artifacts that provide those classes properly as being used declared / unused undeclared dependencies. The most useful way of providing this set of runtime dependencies I think would be to have it take a list of files where each file specified classes - one per line - that were marked as required at runtime. Then you could have a file that you put stuff in manually for things like annotations that are required at runtime but not found as part of the build - and put those in manually. Another file could have a list of classes that another build step prior to the dependency analysis would be responsible for generating as a result of parsing xml config files and overwriting that file. This support might need to wait until after http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MDEP-166 (handling runtime dependencies differently) is taken care of. Adding support for explicitly listing off certain classes that might not be found by scanning but that should definitely be considered as 'used' might also provide another way to handle things such as source-retained annotations in http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MDEP-124 Two questions - How do I use the "analyzer" configuration parameter to swap out the analyzer component (do I just add an artifact to the plugin dependency that contains my analyzer and specify the class in the "analyzer" configuration? - is there a way for me to have my analyzer take additional configuration parameters?) [I've searched for a while, but haven't found any examples, either for this plugin or for swapping components in general in maven] For things that are marked as required at runtime but have no artifacts providing them - there should probably be a new category in the reporting for the class itself "Classes needed at runtime but are not found in any declared or undeclared dependency:" and have it dump out the class names that aren't found in any of the dependencies or transitive dependencies. (Or it could just print error level warnings when it can't find a class in the artifacts anywhere) Ryan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@maven.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@maven.apache.org
