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If you reference a class of sqlite-jdbc in your code, then you indeed should have it declared as dependency directly.

That sentence means other cases, where you e. g. want to downgrade a transitive dependency for some reason or upgrade it, but without actually referencing that dependency in your own code. There a dependency constraint is more suitable.

The dependency constraint you tried just controls the version of the transitive dependency, but does not change its scope. That's why it is not applicable in your case anyway.

Awesome, thank you for the clarification.