This question is about to clarify what exactly a transitive dependency is and how it works at very high level in Maven.
My definition: in a dependency tree like A --> B --> C, C is a transitive dependency for A. Assume B has scope compile within A.
If C has scope compile within B, then declaring B as dependency of A suffices to build A with Maven. But if C has scope provided within B then, when Maven builds A, the building will not automatically compile A against C unless A declares C among its dependencies.
Is this correct?
Your assumption is correct.
There are two types of Maven dependencies:
Direct: These are dependencies defined in your pom.xml file under the <dependencies/> section.
Transitive: These are dependencies that are dependencies of your direct dependencies.
Dependencies with provided scope are meant to:
war files you would not want to include servlet-api, servlet-jsp, etc)