I agree. As you have pointed out, this comes from Ivy. Ivy does not offer a straight forward way to get subset of a dependency graph. But we have worked this out for the report so we could apply this to improve the error reporting as well.

I'd love the error message contain the dependency path(s) in a similar form dependency graphs show the dependency trees.

With Gradle 1.4, you can run gradle dependencies report and it will show you the failed dependencies in the graph.

Since Gradle 1.4, you can run gradle dependencyInsight --configuration testRuntime --dependency javax.jms:jms-1.1 to find out more about the particular dependency. Dependency insight report is available since Gradle 1.3 however, in Gradle 1.4 the report also accepts and renders unresolved dependencies.

Hope that helps!

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Thanks again for reporting this issue. We haven't heard back from you after our inquiry from November 15th. We are closing this issue now. Please create an issue on GitHub if you still feel passionate about getting it resolved.