I spent my time at the CodeCamp working on optional dependency support for Market installations.
Starting point
Market install recipes already supported optional artifacts, but only for workspace-imports, not for classic project dependencies. Smart Workflow, for example, has a lot of optional dependencies think of all the LLM providers and since workspace-imports were the only way to make something optional, that's what they ended up using. The downside: these dependencies get forked into the workspace instead of being managed cleanly behind the scenes via Maven.
Result
I closed that gap by adding optional support for classic project dependencies as well:
Dependencies can now be marked as optional, regardless of whether they're a workspace-import or a regular project dependency.
I also added support for dependency groups, where you can define that exactly one dependency out of a group is required.
Alongside that, I reworked the installation dialog. Whenever a product has required dependencies, they are now shown in a dedicated, additional step where the user can make a targeted selection, instead of being presented with everything at once.
With this in place, Smart Workflow's LLM providers no longer need the workspace-import workaround. During installation, users now simply choose an AI provider as a proper, Maven-managed dependency.
