Resolving log4j 1.2.15 dependency problems in Maven using exclusions
18 May 2009
If you’re using Maven to manage your project’s build and dependencies, you may have encountered some problems when trying to include the latest version of log4j as a dependency. Specifically, log4j 1.2.15 depends on some artifacts that are not available in the central Maven repository due to licensing issues, and thus when you try to build a project that depends on this version of log4j, you may not be able to download the artifacts and your build will fail.
We could download and install these artifacts to the local repository, if we really needed them. But in most cases, they’re not needed and thus you won’t want your project relying on these artifacts just because some parts of log4j do. Thus, we need to exclude them.