The adoption of maven is creating new kinds of dependency hell for Debian. The "download dependencies at compile time" approach is antithetical to the idea of distribution-provided libraries, and encourages authors to be slap-dash about dependency management, and API stability.
If people are going to package java apps for Debian, then we need a better way to build java library packages, perhaps by enhancing maven-debian-helper. This BoF aims to propose solutions to this problem.