Ted Neward wants a new JSR that will deal with the issues of versioning and Jar-to-Jar dependencies.

Markus Kohlher thinks (and I agree with him) that we should specify the dependencies (and versions) within the jar files. He points out that the jar file spec already defines a Class-Path attribute.

A number of solutions to this problem have been proposed, but none has really come to fruition. At the ASF, we've had jjar, cjan, and now Maven. There's also a cjan project at Sourceforge. There might be even more than this.

This is a problem that needs to get solved -- a number of people are taking cracks at it. I wonder -- is there a way to get this happening faster? I know Ted Neward is interested in a JSR and Markus is working on code. I've looked at the jjar code a while ago and talked with some Maven folk about this problem at ApacheCon.