I couldn't answer this for one of the devs in our team, so I thought I'd
push the question to you all for any feedback you could provide.

Any insight would be great...

-joe
-- -- 

Can anyone explain to me why transitive dependencies (even of
dependencies that are specified as "compile" scope in your project) are
put on the compile time classpath? 
It seems to me that transitive dependencies on the compile time
classpath are useless at best, since you shouldn't need them to build
the project. If you have a transitive dependency that you actually do
need for your project to build, doesn't that pretty much by definition
mean that it should be a direct dependency of your project instead? 

For example say that I have a project in which I specify the artifact
"Foo" as a dependency, and foo has a dependency on project "Bar".

If my project doesn't have any direct dependency on Bar then there's no
reason I need Bar to be in my classpath when I build, but having it
there should be benign.

But if my project does depend on Bar then just specifying Foo as a
dependency could cause my project to build fine. It might not even be
obvious that I'm getting my Bar dependency through Foo. This situation
could potentially lead to bugs in my build or in my code if the Foo
project decides to upgrade to Bar 2.0 and my code isn't compatible with
it or if Foo drops its dependency on Bar altogether.

So, is there a reason I'm missing for why you'd ever want to put a
transitive dependency on your compile time classpath?

Is there a way to cause a project to not put transitive dependencies on
its compile time classpath but to keep them on the runtime classpath?

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