Is there any preference for using the "mapping" element in a thirdparty/pom.xml dependency element? My take on it is it's used to prevent breaking the legacy paths that are all over the build system and that for new additions it's better to just have the thirdparty structure mirror the maven repo structure. E.g. I'm adding the org.hibernate/hibernate-jbosscache2 jar while there's an existing hibernate-core:

 <dependency>
 <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
 <artifactId>hibernate-core</artifactId>
 <mapping>
 <componentId>hibernate</componentId>
 </mapping>
 </dependency>
 <dependency>
 <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
 <artifactId>hibernate-jbosscache2</artifactId>
 <!-- No mapping element so this jar will not be located next
 to hibernate-core -->
 </dependency>