> But once in a while something in the long chain of dependencies fails and after days of debugging you start thinking you should just have downloaded the *.jar

> But once in a while something in the long chain of dependencies fails and after days of debugging you start thinking you should just have downloaded the *.jar files and copied them to libs/ manually. Can't you just check the difference between the last working and the first broken one? If necessary just unpack the last working jar/zip/war side-by-side the first broken and diff them. > I think people (in general and not only limited to software development) should strive to minimize dependencies. Here we totally agree. When I started at my current place we had a mix of spring, javaee, hibernate and whatnot. The size is currently down by almost 70% although a lot of that was also unused resources. My goal is just using javaee + a couple of utilities.