Dependency Management - Best Practices for Naming Gradle Version Catalog Entries

Gradle version catalogs provide a standardized way to manage dependencies across a project, but Gradle doesn't enforce naming conventions for catalog entries. The Develocity engineering team shares their internal conventions for deriving version catalog entry names from GAV (Group, Artifact ID, Version) coordinates. Key rules include: use dashes to separate segments, derive the first segment from the project group, omit the first segment if it would repeat the artifact name, translate dashes within group or artifact IDs into camelCase, omit implicit terms like 'java' or 'sdk', and suffix plugin dependencies with '-plugin' when used as libraries. Real-world examples using SLF4J and Jackson illustrate how to apply these conventions.