Incorrect Transitive Dependency Resolution when Declared in Profiles

[hankolerd]

There are some issues with transitive dependency resolution when a dependency uses profiles to select from one or more artifacts:

1. Dependencies declared in any profile marked as <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault> are already resolved even if that profile is de-selected in Maven Profiles options
2. Dependencies from any non-default profile are not transitively resolved even if requesting that profile to be enabled in the Maven Profiles options

My expectation was that enabling/disabling profiles in Maven Profiles configuration of a project would result in identical resolved class path as Maven would see if building the project from command line.

The project structure is as follows:

|----old-component
|  |----pom.xml
|----new-component
|  |----pom.xml
|----consumers
|  |----module1
|  |  |----pom.xml
|  |----module2
|  |  |----pom.xml
|  |----pom.xml
|----pom.xml

If a project, 'module1', swaps a compile dependency based on enablement of one of two profiles, 'old' or 'new', like so:

<profiles>
  <profile>
    <id>old</id>
    <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>test</groupId>
      <artifactId>old-component</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    </dependencies>
  </profile>
  <profile>
    <id>new</id>
    <activation>
      <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
    </activation>
    <dependencies>
      <dependency>
	<groupId>test</groupId>
	<artifactId>new-component</artifactId>
      </dependency>
    </dependencies>
  </profile>
</profiles>

When another project, 'module2', depends on this project, M2Eclipse only ever resolves the transitive dependencies in the "activeByDefault" profile ( 'new'), even when manually selecting the 'old' profile for enablement:

Additionally, if you remove the default profile activation:

-  <activation>
-    <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
-  </activation>

Then neither dependency is transitively resolved for 'module2':

In both of these cases, I would have expected 'old-component', which has dependency declared through 'old' profile, should have been on the project class path, since that profile is selected for enablement.

Attached is a sample project to reproduce the issue.
M2E-wrong-classpath-profile-override.zip

Environment
Operating System: MacOS 15.0
M2E Version: 2.6.1.20240602-2342
Eclipse Version: 4.32.0.v20240601-0610
Java Version: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM Temurin-21.0.4+7

[hankolerd]

Actually I need to add some clarification to this issue. By default, Maven does not take into account transitive dependencies coming through profiles in dependencies. i.e. building 'module2' with -Pnew or -Pold does not bring the transitive deps of 'module1'

In the project POM's at my company where I observed this problem, they have declared an additional profile activation through property:

<profiles>
  <profile>
    <id>old</id>
    <activation>
      <property>
        <name>old</name>
      </property>
    </activation>
  </profile>
  <profile>
    <id>new</id>
    <activation>
      <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
      <property>
        <name>new</name>
      </property>
    </activation>
  </profile>
</profiles>

In this case, Maven will activate profiles and honor transitive dependencies in the profiles of dependency POM's if the property is set in the build, i.e. mvn clean install -Pold -Dold or mvn clean install -Pnew -Dnew.

As such, I suspect this is a pretty extreme edge case to swap compile-time dependencies based on build profiles, considering getting even Maven to honor the transitives is kind of relying on a hack and doesn't appear that they really intended to support it by design.