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Maven 2.0 allowed the RELEASE versioning model. ie when specifying which version you wanted, you could just say <version>RELEASE<version> and it would get the latest for you.

In Maven 3.0 this has been dropped. The reason they give is that you need to ensure reproducible builds. But this doesn't address the reason that RELEASE was there in the first place.

The point of the RELEASE was to enable fast failures in your build when chaining module dependencies together. If you lock the versions down, then a future failure due to a change in a grandchild module won't get detected until you upgrade the versions. If you use LATEST, then the failing change in the grandchild module gets detected right away.

My question is: How do you do fail-fast for grandchild dependencies since RELEASE versioning was deprecated in Maven?

hawkeye
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  • The special version `RELEASE` mean to use the latest which contradicts reproducibility. And that the reason why it has been deprecated and will produce WARNING's for the [most recent version of Maven](http://maven.apache.org/docs/3.5.2/release-notes.html). The detecting can simply being done by using automated testings which uses versions-maven-plugin to update dependency versions automatically and check if it's working if not do not update the version and information the devs about it... – khmarbaise Nov 24 '17 at 12:17

1 Answers1

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The trick is to use Maven 3 and the Maven Versions Plugin :

In particular the following goals could be of use:

  • versions:use-latest-versions searches the pom for all versions which have been a newer version and replaces them with the latest version.
  • versions:use-latest-releases searches the pom for all non-SNAPSHOT versions which have been a newer release and replaces them with the latest release version.
  • versions:update-properties updates properties defined in a project so that they correspond to the latest available version of specific dependencies. This can be useful if a suite of dependencies must all be locked to one version.

The following other goals are also provided:

  • versions:display-dependency-updates scans a project's dependencies and produces a report of those dependencies which have newer versions available.
  • versions:display-plugin-updates scans a project's plugins and produces a report of those plugins which have newer versions available.
  • versions:update-parent updates the parent section of a project so that it references the newest available version. For example, if you use a corporate root POM, this goal can be helpful if you need to ensure you are using the latest version of the corporate root POM.
  • versions:update-child-modules updates the parent section of the child modules of a project so the version matches the version of the current project. For example, if you have an aggregator pom that is also the parent for the projects that it aggregates and the children and parent versions get out of sync, this mojo can help fix the versions of the child modules. (Note you may need to invoke Maven with the -N option in order to run this goal if your project is broken so badly that it cannot build because of the version mis-match).
  • versions:lock-snapshots searches the pom for all -SNAPSHOT versions and replaces them with the current timestamp version of that -SNAPSHOT, e.g. -20090327.172306-4
  • versions:unlock-snapshots searches the pom for all timestamp locked snapshot versions and replaces them with -SNAPSHOT.
  • versions:resolve-ranges finds dependencies using version ranges and resolves the range to the specific version being used.
  • versions:use-releases searches the pom for all -SNAPSHOT versions which have been released and replaces them with the corresponding release version.
  • versions:use-next-releases searches the pom for all non-SNAPSHOT versions which have been a newer release and replaces them with the next release version.
  • versions:use-next-versions searches the pom for all versions which have been a newer version and replaces them with the next version.
  • versions:commit removes the pom.xml.versionsBackup files. Forms one half of the built-in "Poor Man's SCM".
  • versions:revert restores the pom.xml files from the pom.xml.versionsBackup files. Forms one half of the built-in "Poor Man's SCM".
hawkeye
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