title: Are conflicting transitive dependencies a serious issue in Maven?
body: <p>I have a project X which shows quite a lot of conflicting dependencies in the dependency hierarchy (as displayed in Eclipse's dependency hierarchy view). I see lots of things like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>clojure: 1.3.0 (omitted for conflict with 1.4.0) [compile]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This usually occurs because two of the libraries used by X specify two different versions of some other library - i.e. the conflicts are occuring because of shared transitive dependencies. In quite a few cases the conflicts are in 3rd party libraries I can't directly control.</p>
  
  <p>Fortunately everything builds and runs fine right now, but I'm worried if this situation might cause problems in the future.</p>
  
  <p>Is this a problem I should be worried about and if so, what should I be doing about it?</p>