Maven dependency conflict resolution is annoying

With Spark development, I am frequently running into dependency conflicts because of Maven’s “nearest wins” strategy for resolving transitive dependencies.

The scenario I have frequently is something like this

• one of the Spark libraries depends on jackson-databind version 2.6.7
• jackson-databind depends on jackson-core 2.6.7
• Some other dependency in my POM depends on an older version of jackson-core (say, 2.3)
• Maven resolves the conflict by giving preference to the “nearest”, or more direct, dependency – so the older version of jackson-core wins because it’s one level closer to the root of the dependency graph
• jackson-databind now breaks against the old version of jackson-core

For any one given library, this can be solved easily in the POM by either excluding offending transitive dependencies, or by explicitly specifying version numbers.

But this is a huge hassle at scale, and it’s super-frustrating that Maven does not implement an option for a “newest wins” strategy instead. By not having such a feature, every single Maven project out there is effectively implementing a one-off “newest wins” on any library that encounters a conflict.

Written on July 5, 2020