When to use “optional” dependencies and when to use “provided” scope?

Question

Dependencies decorated by true or provided will be ignored when they are dependent tran

Answer 1

A minor difference I'd like to point out is the treatment of optional vs. provided by various plugins that create packages.

Apparently war plugin will not package optional dependencies, but there is an open bug about it: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MWAR-351

The assembly plugin doesn't seem to provide any way to filter based on optional status, while it allows you to filter based on scope.

It seems the same is true for the shade plugin.

TL;DR if you are not developing a library, but a top-level application provided scope will give you more flexibility.