symbol-processing-aa-embeddable is an unspecified dependency of kspKotlin

[hugoncosta]

Hello,

We're working on upgrading to Kotlin 2.1.21 and we've seen that com.google.devtools.ksp:symbol-processing-aa-embeddable:2.1.21-2.0.2 is now a required dependency of kspKotlin. We see that this entails taking a dependency on a 60MB uberjar with duplicated classes that are present in the classpath through their original Maven coordinates. The dependency is not clear in the pom, it's pulled directly by the Gradle plugin at runtime. See the following table to see the conflicts we found

Package Conflicts

Package	Shared Classes	Overlap %
org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-annotation-processing-gradle	639	5.7%
org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-annotation-processing-embeddable	213	1.9%
org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-build-common	68	0.6%
org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-native-utils	29	0.3%
org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-build-statistics	17	0.2%
org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-util-klib	15	0.1%
org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-build-tools-api	13	0.1%
org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-daemon-client	12	0.1%
org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-daemon-embeddable	12	0.1%
com.google.devtools.ksp:symbol-processing	10	0.1%

This dependency wasn't required in 2.0.21-1.0.28 but it seems required for 2.1.21-2.0.2. I have the following questions

• Is this really required?
• If it is required, can the classes be shaded to avoid classpath conflicts or removed completely?
• If it is required, can you have it in the pom as well?

This is prone to creating classpath conflicts in our build tools, which are messy to solve.