title: Why aren't 'provided' Maven dependencies 'transitive'?
body: <h3>Why doesn't Maven inherit provided dependencies?</h3>
  <p><strong>My situation:</strong><br />
  I have 2 independent projects <strong>A</strong> and <strong>B</strong>.<br />
  I don't own project <strong>A</strong>.<br />
  <strong>A</strong> and <strong>B</strong> use a some of the same libraries:</p>
  <ul>
  <li>reflections-0.9.9-RC1.jar</li>
  <li>guava-11.0.2.jar</li>
  <li>xml-apis-1.0.b2.jar</li>
  <li>javassist-3.16.1-GA.jar</li>
  <li>dom4j-1.6.1.jar</li>
  <li>jsr305-1.3.9.jar</li>
  </ul>
  <p>I made project <strong>C</strong>, which is a plugin for project <strong>A</strong>, but also uses project <strong>B</strong>.</p>
  <p>Project <strong>C</strong> pom.xml:</p>
  <pre class="lang-xml prettyprint-override"><code>&lt;dependencies&gt;
      &lt;dependency&gt;
          &lt;groupId&gt;com.a&lt;/groupId&gt;
          &lt;artifactId&gt;a&lt;/artifactId&gt;
          &lt;version&gt;1.0&lt;/version&gt;
          &lt;scope&gt;provided&lt;/scope&gt;
      &lt;/dependency&gt;
      &lt;dependency&gt;
          &lt;groupId&gt;com.b&lt;/groupId&gt;
          &lt;artifactId&gt;b&lt;/artifactId&gt;
          &lt;version&gt;1.0&lt;/version&gt;
          &lt;scope&gt;compile&lt;/scope&gt;
      &lt;/dependency&gt;
  &lt;/dependencies&gt;
  &lt;build&gt;
      &lt;plugins&gt;
          &lt;plugin&gt;
              &lt;groupId&gt;org.apache.maven.plugins&lt;/groupId&gt;
              &lt;artifactId&gt;maven-shade-plugin&lt;/artifactId&gt;
              &lt;version&gt;2.4.2&lt;/version&gt;
              &lt;executions&gt;
                  &lt;execution&gt;
                      &lt;phase&gt;package&lt;/phase&gt;
                      &lt;goals&gt;
                          &lt;goal&gt;shade&lt;/goal&gt;
                      &lt;/goals&gt;
                  &lt;/execution&gt;
              &lt;/executions&gt;
          &lt;/plugin&gt;
      &lt;/plugins&gt;
  &lt;/build&gt;
  </code></pre>
  <p>Now I want to make plugins for project <strong>C</strong> but I can't.<br />
  If I create project <strong>D</strong> with a dependency to project <strong>C</strong>,<br />
  it won't inherit the dependency to project <strong>A</strong>.<br />
  It will if I set the scope to <code>compile</code> but that would shade it into project <strong>C</strong> which is not useful and would cause duplicates.</p>
  <p>So now I have to add dependency to both <strong>A</strong> and <strong>B</strong> with every plugin I make.</p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>Compile -This is the default scope, used if none is specified. Compile dependencies are available in all classpaths of a project. Furthermore, those dependencies are propagated to dependent projects.</p>
  <p>Provided - This is much like compile, but indicates you expect the JDK or a container to provide the dependency at runtime. For example, when building a web application for the Java Enterprise Edition, you would set the dependency on the Servlet API and related Java EE APIs to scope provided because the web container provides those classes. This scope is only available on the compilation and test classpath, <strong>and is not transitive.</strong></p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>Why not?</p>