Apache Jakarta Gump

http://jakarta.apache.org/gump/

From the site: Gump is a social experiment. The primary goal of Gump is to get diverse projects to communicate early and often about integration, dependencies, and versioning management. One way to think about it is that some of the concepts of ExtremeProgramming applied to ContinuousIntegration on an unprecedented scale.

Essentially, the reasoning goes like this - if ContinuousIntegration is a good thing on a small project, why not apply it recursively and include all dependencies for which access to source is provided?

This is a fantastic idea! This should help reduce version conflicts in a big way.

It should also get open source developers thinking and talking more about "published" APIs ... and how to deal with the (occational) need for a public method which you don't want to be a "published" part of the API.

consider marking those methods deprecated while they are needed.