Its there to mimic behavior JVZ promised me he would add to Maven but never has (in 3 years). Basically it allows you to *dynamically* alter the test classpath. We don't use it per se because its not really intended for us. Its intended for people running the hibernate testsuite(s) against "other databases". The build works ok for us without it there, but it needs to be there. On Thu, 2010-01-14 at 14:59 -0300, Hardy Ferentschik wrote: -- Steve Ebersole <steve(a)hibernate.org&gt; Hibernate.org