I've just been through the common project (but not JBossXB) and sorted out the mess it had become. 1) There was a circular dependency betten common-core and jboss-test (and transitively common-core and common-logging-log4j). I've removed common-core's use of jboss-test which solves the issue. It now just uses plain junit. The only actual use was the initialization of log4j. I've changed the tests to use System.out.println() 2) There was some confusion between whether these artifiacts should go in the jboss or org.jboss namespace. I've now made it consistently use the org.jboss namespace. Although there are no releases of the logging framework in the org.jboss namespace this should be done with a 2.0.5.GA release and everybody then should be using those artifacts. 3) The poms were referencing fixed releases of some artifacts. So for example even if you changed something in common-core the other projects didn't see it. Instead they downloaded an older release from repository.jboss.com I also think this should use version properties from build/pom.xml like we do in other projects instead of having to update the version changes in many different places. 4) I made the common-logging-log4j/jdk dependencies on common-core optional. Since these are only required for features rather than normal use. i.e. in log4j for the TCLFilter's use of WeakSet and in jdk for the DOMConfigurator's use of property editors. -- xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Adrian Brock Chief Scientist JBoss, a division of Red Hat xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx