Maven : Should I keep or remove declared dependencies that are also transitives dependencies?

Question

Do you think it is a good practice to remove every transitive dependencies that can be found in a maven pom?

Example:
My project depends on A and B.
B is also a transitive dependency of A.
Should I keep B in my pom or remove it ?

What is the best:
having all known jars, even transitive one, declared on the pom or keeping only the top level jars ?

This is a little bit subjective, but I am trying to clean some huge poms (parent and children) with a lot of transitive dependencies. I want to keep my pom as simple as possible, but I want also them to be maintainable.

Answer 1

If your project has direct dependencies on B then you should keep it even if B is a transitive dependency of A. It can be that in the next version A won't use B an you'll have to restructure the pom.xml.

Generally, Maven dependencies should reflect the logical project dependencies.