title: Maven classpath order issues
body: <p>Does anyone know of a way to set a specific classpath order in Maven2, rather than the random ordering I appear to experience at the moment?</p>
  
  <p>There are a number of legitimate reasons for wanting to do this:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>A vendor has supplied a patch jar, which contains overriding classes for a previously released jar and therefore the patch jar must appear first in the classpath ordering.</li>
  <li>Two jar's found on the classpath discovered by traversing pom dependencies contain the same class in the same package with different signitures. For example:</li>
  </ul>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p> jboss 
    jbossall-client
    4.2.0.GA<br>
    </p>
    
    <p>
           org.hibernate
           hibernate
           3.1   </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>both contain:
  org.hibernate.util.ReflectHelper.class, but the jbossall-client version is missing the getFastClass method.</p>
  
  <p>From googling I see that this is perhaps a point of contention between maven enthusiasts and people facing this particular issue, but surely there are legitimate reasons for classpath ordering.</p>
  
  <p>Any advice from anyone that has solved this particular quandary would be much appreciated!</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>