Gradle dependency versions '+' sign

Question

I'm trying to understand how Gradle handles dependency versions with a '+' sign as seen in example 8.1 here: http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/artifact_dependencies_tutorial.html

testCompile group: 'junit', name: 'junit', version: '4.+

The documentation states that this will get a version of junit >= 4.0. How would a get a version of a dependency greater than (or equal to), say, 5.10? Would it be 5.10+ or 5.1+? The former seems to not work correctly, but the latter does. How would I get a dependency greater than or equal to 1.22? 1.2+? In this scenario, if version 1.21 exists and is the latest version, I would like to fail, since I want greater than or equal to 1.22, but 1.2+ will look for >= 1.20. How can I specify this? Is this possible? I can't seem to find more documentation on it.

Edit: I tend to think of it as 1.2+ is equivalent to 1.2([0-9]+). Is this the correct way of thinking?

Answer 1

In this scenario, if version 1.21 exists and is the latest version, I would like to fail, since I want greater than or equal to 1.22, but 1.2+ will look for >= 1.20. How can I specify this? Is this possible?

I don't think there is any documentation about this, but since Gradle originally used Ivy under the hood for all its dependency management functionality, I took a look at the Ivy documentation regarding dynamic versions:

http://ant.apache.org/ivy/history/latest-milestone/ivyfile/dependency.html

It has only slightly more than the Gradle documentation. I tried experimenting in Gradle with Ivy-style version ranges:

compile group: 'log4j', name: 'log4j', version: '[1.2.12,1.2.17]' 

and surprisingly it seems to sometimes work depending on what the version range is. In the example above it resolves to 1.2.17.

I know this doesn't fully address your questions (which I am curious about too) but hopefully it provides a bit of information for you.

Answer 2

I think the issue is that you are incorrectly thinking of the "+" in terms of regex. It isn't meant to be read as a regex expression element ("one or more numeric characters"), but rather as "the latest available version where each of the leading SEMVER components match the pattern provided". References on why this is not preferred to even use this notation can be found at: http://central.sonatype.org/articles/2014/Oct/28/enforcing-valid-dependency-versions/