Dependencies not using sub-dependencies like Maven

Help/Discuss
1

I’m converting a maven build to Gradle.

In my maven project (in eclipse) I have a dependency…

<dependency>
	<groupId>org.codehaus.groovy</groupId>
	<artifactId>groovy-cli-commons</artifactId>
	<version>3.0.2</version>
	<scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

If I look at the dependency tree it shows that maven loads its dependency …

commons-cli:commons-cli:1.4

However, Gradle does not load this dependency and I am forced to add a compileOnly line in my dependencies like this…

compileOnly ‘org.codehaus.groovy:groovy-cli-commons:’ + groovy_version
compileOnly ‘commons-cli:commons-cli:1.4’ // Why is this needed when it is a dependency of groovy-cli-commons ?

What I’m I missing?

2

If I look at the dependency here https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.codehaus.groovy/groovy-cli-commons/3.0.5

I can see that commons-cli is a runtime dependency, not a compile dependency

3

Yes, I now see that, but is this just a difference in the way Maven handles “provided” dependencies vs Gradle “compileOnly” dependencies? I was assuming that “provided” was the same as “compileOnly”. Maybe I’m mistaken. Seems like Maven is more “forgiving”… which I will admit is not following what the dependency rules are…

4

I don’t claim to be an expert in the differences of maven provided vs gradle compileOnly, possibly worth reading https://blog.gradle.org/introducing-compile-only-dependencies