Sadly I’m not a fan of the cousier proposal… My three things are: 1. In general, it’s better to have fewer versions of things, so we should be aiming as a community to move in that direction, rather than giving up and saying “have as many versions as you like, we’ll make it easy!” - shading should be a last resort, not a default go-to. I really dislike that Rust went in the opposite direction here, but at least in Rust the linker can make most of that go away; in the JVM world, once something’s shaded, it’s there. (Maybe some of the java9 AOT stuff helps here? But the reflection capabilities make it hard) 2. A lot of things in the JVM world don’t play nicely with shading. Static initialisers, singletons, registries, reflection, … - so shading by default is scary. 3. The maven ecosystem has not bought into semver, or version ranges - a lot of version matching that ivy/coursier do is super sketchy, so merging “should be compatible” things is hard to safely do

But the reflection capabilities make it hard

you "can't" reflect outside your declared package dependencies... unless they completely removed that restriction before landing it. cc @fancy-queen-20734

Aah yeah, I haven’t really dug into modules, maybe that problem goes away 🙂