Versioning for a maven project with small, very frequent releases

Question

I'm converting an ant project to a maven one. This project differs from the ones I've usually converted since it has very frequent releases, typically 8-10 times per day.

By release I mean that the resulting jar is packaged and included in the production enviroment. This project is a leaf one, so it publishes no API, it only consumes it. It is also at most a runtime dependency for two other projects.

I'd like to have a versioning scheme where:

• it's easy to deploy without forcing the developers to think about what version number to assign to the project, since the number is meaningless;
• It's easy to include the latest version of this project as a dependency without constantly bumping up dependency versions;

Most likely the dependency version would not be a -SNAPSHOT, since that would conflict with the maven-release-plugin we're using for other projects, but I'm open to suggestions.

Answer 1

Actually, you can use x-SNAPSHOT version and still use the maven-release-plugin. Just use mvn release:prepare before mvn release:perform to prepare your release and change the version in the poms from x-SNAPSHOT to a new version (you will be prompted for the versions to use). You can check out this introduction to the maven-release-plugin for a quick overview of release:prepare and release:perform.

Then, to include the latest version without constantly updating dependencies version, you could use dependency ranges like in the following snippet where we specify a range Junit 3.8 - Junit 4.0:

<dependency>
  <groupId>junit</groupId>
  <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
  <version>[3.8,4.0)</version>
  <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

A version before or after the comma is not required, and means +/- infinity. For example, [4.0,) means any version greater than or equal to 4.0.

Personally, I don't like to use dependency ranges that much because I find that it can lead to build reproducibility issues and makes the build more fragile.

But you may have good reasons to use them.