Transitive dependencies in Maven2 rock. Until they don't. Tracking down all the turds of a dependency that you need to get rid of is a real chore.

Take Acegi Security, for instance. It's currently specifying Spring 1.2.7. I can specify locally newer versions, but unless I put exclusions in the acegi dependency, it includes the closure of the dependencies, and some of them I may not have named. It's a mess to sort out using 'mvn -X'.

I use Mvn Registry a lot to build up my POMs. It works great.

So I started having these half-baked visions that Mvn Registry could help with writing these excliusions. I thought I had an idea for it, but I forgot it while typing this up. Maybe this is enough of a seed.