Question: Basically, I've become accustomed to developing with the mongo that's packed with Meteor, not for anything other than development of course.

I'm beginning to run into features of MongoDB in the newer version that isn't available to me with the MongoDB that's shipped with Meteor.

For example, in Mongo, the $sort within a $push no longer requires $slice:

<http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/operator/update/sort/>

Just curious if this is a limitation or if there's a workaround? I can use a remote DB or local one but the quick dev tools are helpful.

Answer: 
`intransitive` is discouraged because :

* downstream users don't see it in their POM and it might break their runtime,
* even if they know what dependency to add, its version won't be synced with upstream.

`provided` is reserved for when the dependency is expected to be in the runtime, e.g. an application container.

I would reserve `intransitive` for cases where the dependency is not needed in the runtime, only at compile-time. e.g. compiler annotations
This is a perfect use case for the "provided" configuration. In your project, depend on the library (say 'foo') in the `"provided"` configuration like this:

```
libraryDependencies += "org.foo" %% "foo" % "1.0" % "provided"

```

This will add `foo` to the classpath at compile-time, but won't register `"org.foo" %% "foo" % "1.0"` in the metadata (pom) of your artifact. Therefore, users of your project will not depend on foo, simply because they won't see it at all.