Right now, Forge extensions must use the maven shade-plugin to package referenced dependencies of plugins. It would greatly enhance developer experience if referenced plugins or libraries could be dynamically loaded from the local maven repository, even if built with Git.

A META-INF/dependencies file could be used to list runtime dependencies of the plugin. Or the POM files of each plugin (META-INF/pom...) could be scanned and parsed to determine required libs.

A third option, programmatic declaration of runtime dependencies might also be an option if it can be worked into Java from Groovy: http://groovy.codehaus.org/Grape

Benefits of these approaches are:

• Reduced size deliverable ZIPfile
• ...