since Gradle cannot express an exclusion in a platform, I'd like to embed that logic in a plugin, applied at consumers, that check if a specific dependency is present, and if yes, proceed by adding an exclusion on a specific transitive dependency would something like this suffice/work as intended? (that is, will this be evaluated after the

dependencies { }

block has been evaluated?)

configurations.all {
    if (dependencies.find { it.group = .. && it.artifact == .. } != null)
         exclude("group", "artifact")

that doesn't seem like a good idea. depends on order of evaluation

as far as I got it, I can define the rule in a third plugin, but the user has to be aware how to apply it and do it, am I right? Like here

components {
        withModule<TargetJvmVersionRule>("commons-io:commons-io") {
            params(7)
        }
        withModule<TargetJvmVersionRule>("commons-collections:commons-collections") {
            params(8)
        }
    }

your plugin could set it up

ok, so how it check if the dependency is present and then apply on it the rule?

it doesn't matter if the dependency is present or not, you can just always add a rule which only mutates the one thing you want to

I need to still clarify with the Scijava pom author(s) if the dependency presence or not is a strict requirement or not for the exclusion