I am not overly familiar with this dependency plugin, but the overall approach sounds essentially the same as I described in my "staging" approach. The concern I had was knowing which dependencies to pull resources from. I would then guess that this dependency plugin you mention requires you to explicitly state the coordinate to be unpacked; essentially doubling the config? I am not overly familiar with 'xmlto' other than the fact it exists ;) inline with the plugin using a Transformer built based on the configuration, project, etc. The only drawback I have seen is the fact that SAXON eats large amounts of memory.