Hi all - when using the

kotlin-maven-plugin

, is there a way to exclude a dependency from the test compile classpath? Context - I’m migrating a project from JUnit 4 to JUnit 5. But it uses testcontainers, which has a transitive dependency on JUnit 4. It’s really easy to accidentally use JUnit 4 annotations, and then find your tests aren’t running… I’d like to exclude JUnit 4 from the test compile classpath so that if you do so you find out fast. Maven doesn’t distinguish between compile & runtime for test scope (why not?!) so I can’t just drop it down to be a runtime scoped dependency. I could exclude it as a dependency of testcontainers, but: a) that would exclude it from the runtime classpath, and testcontainers probably needs it b) the odds are some other dependency will bring it in, now or later… playing whack-a-mole like that is zero fun (Yes it would be easy in Gradle. No I’m not up for having that fight now.)

Why would testcontainers need it at runtime, if you don't want to run JUnit 4 stuff? I'd try excluding it… 🤷‍♂️

GenericContainer

implements

org.junit.rules.TestRule

. I’m fairly sure the JVM will fail trying to load a class where some of the supertypes are not on the runtime classpath.

OK, if it's so tightly coupled, I guess the problem is testcontainers – not Maven.

It’s both. If maven allowed distinguishing between the compile & runtime classpath for tests then I could make JUnit 4 runtime scoped, which would stop anyone accidentally compiling against JUnit 4.

Maven assembles the classpaths, nothing Kotlin specific here.

I know that. I was asking about a possible backdoor in the

kotlin-maven-plugin

to alter the classpath.