How to restrict transitive dependencies to one level

[Jason Frank <jf...@guptamedia.com>]

I know how to restrict a dependency with transitive="false" so that it 
only brings in the direct dependency.  Is it possible to control the 
depth of transitive dependencies so that I bring in one level, but no 
deeper?  I want to bring in a dependency with all the things that it 
directly depends on, but none of the further dependencies of those 2nd 
level dependencies.

Here is why, and maybe there's a better solution.  I have a project, 
let's call it Project A, that depends on a 3rd-party project, let's call 
that Project B.  Project B has a few jars of its own, and it also 
depends on a bunch of other 3rd-party jars.  Project B exists in the 
Ibiblio maven repository, so I am trying to use that so that I don't 
need to bring all these jars into my private Ivy repository.  The 
dependencies of Project B are kind of a mess, in that their respective 
transitive dependencies use different versions of various jars like 
commons-logging.  I have tried using the <override> element, 
configurations, excludes, and various other tactics to get it to play 
nicely, but it's proving quite elusive.

What I want to do now is, make a "fake" ivy artifact that lists all the 
exact versions of Project B's direct jars and all the 3rd-party jars 
that I want as dependencies, with transitive=false.  Let's call this 
fake ivy artifact Project C, and it represents the flattened 
dependencies of Project B.  Now I want to make Project A depend on 
Project C, so that it will get all the things that I really wanted from 
Project B.  The problem I have is, I only want to get Project C's direct 
dependencies into Project A, because I've carefully made those into the 
exact jars I want.  So I want to restrict the transitive resolution to 
one level, when I say that Project A depends on Project C.  Is this 
possible?