I discovered this while trying to implement
https://issuetracker.springsource.com/browse/STS-2405

What this needs to be able to do is take a dependency and try to resolve it in the workspace (i.e. find a maven project in the workspace mathcing the dependency).

Unfortunately, I'm not receiving the information needed to do that unless the dependency can first be resolved outside the workspace. This seems to defeat the purpose of STS-2405, since the idea is to avoid needing to publish a jar to the some maven repo in the first place.

In other words, we need information even if the dependency was not resolvable.

I gather the reason why this is now null is because it wants to return a precise version rather than a range. (Bug: GRADLE-809)

But it would be useful to be able to obtain either a range or a precise version. I.e. it should be possible to get access to both the info used to do the resolution as well as the actual resolved result.

A complete lack of information about a given dependency when it is not resolvable seems like a poor solution (at least for my particular use-case).