Maven & No Commons Logging

Maven includes Commons Logging by default, which isn't what you really want if you'd like to use SLF4J for your logging facade. A nice solution to fake out Maven was written at this blog. Basically you have a fake version 99.0 as an empty jar named the same as Commons Logging so it's downloaded instead.

I noticed builds were running really slow and it seems that he Maven repository (http://no-commons-logging.zapto.org/mvn2) has been down for days. As a temporary solution I've put the no Commons Logging jars into the Spring by Example repo and put a mirror entry into my settings.xml.

It would be nice if Maven just had a way to do global excludes if you don't want a jar no matter what transitive dependencies are resolved.


~/.m2/settings.xml
<settings>
  <mirrors>
    <mirror>
      <id>no-commons-logging</id>
      <name>No Commons Logging</name>
      <url>http://www.springbyexample.org/maven/repo</url>
      <mirrorof>no-commons-logging</mirrorof>
    </mirror>
  </mirrors>
</settings>