I'm loading classes using a custom class loader. For the most part, everything works, but sometimes when I load particularly complex projects/libraries, I get a strange bug:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ClassCircularityError: 
  org/apache/commons/codec/binary/Hex
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClassCond(ClassLoader.java:632)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:616)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:466)
    at my.custom.class.Loader.loadClass(...)

Looking at the Javadocs, I wouldn't expect defineClass to throw this particular error. org/apache/commons/codec/binary/Hex is the class I'm trying to load. It's almost as if defineClass wants a copy of the class before it'll define the class - which makes no sense to me.

Ideas?

java circular-dependency classloader
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