I am building a project using Maven that contains Hibernate.

One of the downsides of Maven appears to be that there is no way (that I have found) to allow you to specify dependencies upon dependencies.

So, for example, when including Hibernate in my project, i have to work out what dependencies Hibernate has, and include those as well. If the included libraries have dependencies, they too must be included.

So I end up having to specify a tree of dependencies in my project, and spend a LOT of time working out what the tree is, just to get my project to a point where Hibernate works.

Now I know that this is not an issue specific to Hibernate. Any project that has dependencies in this manner will have this problem.

However, one thing that could be done is to include an xml fragment with hibernate (similar to the VERSIONS text file in the lib directory) that lists the dependencies, and version numbers, and maybe a comment or two explaining when the dependant jars are required.

That way, when a developer wants to use Hibernate in Maven they can copy the xml fragment (or include it as an entity reference) into their Maven project.xml

Thoughts?...

It appears as though Hibernate uses a bespoke version of cglib which is not included in the ibiblio website.

Where should I go to get cglib-asm?

I went through the exact same pain a couple months ago. The nice thing is that once it is all worked out you get a lot of automation.

The asm bit was one of the harder parts for me to figure out, but here are the dependencies that I am using now:

<dependency>
<groupId>asm</groupId>
<artifactId>asm</artifactId>
<version>1.3.4</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>asm</groupId>
<artifactId>asm-util</artifactId>
<version>1.3.4</version>
</dependency>