To me this alias proposal is pretty much the way it's been done in Java forever, so whenever you call for "foo.bar.Baz", the classloader is free to give you bac

To me this alias proposal is pretty much the way it's been done in Java forever, so whenever you call for "foo.bar.Baz", the classloader is free to give you back a different implementation, including vendor/foo/bar/Baz, or even a mock implementation. I think in any large scale dependency chain, you're eventually going to have two transitive dependencies D1 and D2 that both use dependency E, but different versions. Inside Google we have the OneVersionPolicy, because we control everything in our repo, but in the external ecosystem, this is a frequent occurrence, that has to be solved by either classloader isolation, or upgrades.