Disclaimer
(I originally asked the question in a very detailed manner over here. I've excerpted it here as the maven-users mailing list has gone quiet on this question.) (not just another newbie question)
Reference
My reference material is http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-dependency-mechanism.html#Dependency_Management; please let me know in this discussion if this is outdated or wrong.
Question
There is a section in that document that begins with "A second, and very important...". In what follows I'll refer to that section's projects A and B, and will excerpt from them.
In that section, you will see that project A has a <dependencyManagement> section that--among other things--defines an artifact, c, as having scope compile:
<!-- In A's pom.xml; condensed for brevity -->
<dependencyManagement>
<dependency>
<groupId>test</groupId>
<artifactId>c</artifactId>
<version>1.0</version>
<scope>compile</scope> <!-- look: compile scope -->
</dependency>
</dependencyManagement>
Then you will see a pom.xml for project B that (a) inherits from project A (thus inheriting its dependencyManagement section) and (b) establishes a dependency on artifact c, without having to specify its version. You will also notice that the dependency on artifact c overrides the scope of c to be runtime, not compile:
<!-- In B's pom.xml, whose parent is A's pom.xml (above); condensed for brevity -->
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>test</groupId>
<artifactId>c</artifactId>
<scope>runtime</scope> <!-- look: runtime scope -->
</dependency>
</dependencies>
Again, you'll note that there is no <version> element, but there is a <scope>runtime</scope> element.
My interpretation of this is that when all is said and done, B will depend on version 1.0 of artifact c in runtime scope, not compile scope.
Is that correct? My maven-ear-plugin bug rests on the fact that this is the expected behavior. It is not what happens when the maven-ear-plugin builds an .ear file.
Next, if that's correct, I would also expect that if artifact c had any transitive runtime dependencies they would be available in B's runtime classpath (as defined by the somewhat baffling table in http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-dependency-mechanism.html#Dependency_Scope).
Is that correct?
