This is a hard one. We use Ivy to read from Maven repositories. As long as Ivy doesn't offer such a functionality, we can't do anything about it. I think it would be cool if Ivy would switch to use the new Maven mercury module to access Maven repositories. That way heaps of there incompatibility problems would just vanish. In the future Gradle might have other options but at the moment you can only file a Jira at Ivy.

IMO, the current behavior of Gradle/Ivy is correct. At least in the default case I do not want repositories added to my build by dependencies. It can cause problems because it makes your build less predictable when you don't have full control over where artifacts are downloaded. There is more information about this in the Maven wiki (http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVEN/Artifact+resolution+and+repository+discovery)

Related to MNG-3056

@Paul Thanks for pointing this out.

Yet I'm looking forward to writing an Ivy resolver that uses Maven Mercury under the hood. It is a hard and continuos job to reverse engineer Maven resolution. Ivy is doing a pretty good job. But if there are bugs we rely on Ivy to be fixed and if they are fixed we have to wait for an Ivy release or we need to go with an ivy snapshot. In my opinion Ivy should have used Maven for analyzing the pom instead of reverse engineering it. As you know, they could have used the maven ant tasks for this. Anyhow, I talked with Jason van Zyl recently. He told me that the current Mercury sources are not relevant any more. Sonatype is doing a complete rewrite which is not published yet. Once this is available we will start using it for 100 percent compatible Maven 3 resolution.

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