All I just updated the development guidelines with these notes: * You should mark a dependency as optional unless you think at least 80% of users are going to need that dependency -- in other words, non-optional dependencies should only be those which none of the code will operate without. * If you have multiple distinct usages for your module (e.g. consumers of the Drools module might just be interested in DroolsFlow, and not Drools Fusion), then consider creating stack POMs which define the dependencies for each usage. Each stack POM is a separate maven module, and should be placed in the stacks/<usage> directory. HTH