Maven integration and Orbeon dependency mess

Hi,

I am not sure if this has been brought up as topic before, so here goes:

When looking at the libraries used, I see alot jars without versioning (sure you can investigate their manifest, but often those aren't correct, i.e. with luck you get the version). Some of the jars are alterered, that is, they contain patched files to support correct functionality (see saxon-8.8, they contain org.orbeon packages and zero saxon packages). And, some of these are renamed to reflect transitive dependencies which leads to more confusement.

In my opinion, this is wrong. Upgrading becomes hard when you're not sure what version you are using.

Another observation is that I find 'conflicting' solutions/dependencies, where all in all, the whole lot becomes bloated? The lib directory is (rounded up) 50Mb.

For example:
- fop vs itext
- dom4j vs jdom
- saxon vs xalan

This leads to the next question, what is minimal required to run Orbeon? Meaning, what do I need to have for a clean and mean Orbeon (without all examples and their required libraries). Less is more?

Any feedback?

Regards,
Mike