After some discussion and debate, the Maven developers have agreed [1] to replan the next release of Maven.
The original plans for Maven 3.4.0 were that it should consist of effectively a no-op drop in replacement of Eclipse's Aether project (which has been retired at the Eclipse Foundation) for the migrated code now known as Apache's Maven Resolver. Additionally the plans called for some other orthogonal changes around logging colourization and some launcher script bug fixes. Due to some misunderstanding, there were quite a number of other changes introduced which could be seen as modifying how dependencies and classpaths get built. While we want to get these changes released as bug fixes, it is also important to us to provide a clear progression of development. Some of the bugs we want to fix require changes to the resolver code and the developers feel it is important to mark the baseline of the migrated code such that it should be a drop-in replacement for 3.3.9. In that regard we have reset the master branches of the following GIT repositories to the point in time that corresponds to the 3.3.9 release: * git://git.apache.org/maven.git was reset to bce33aa2662a51d18cb00347cf2fb174dc195fb1 * git://git.apache.org/maven-integration-testing.git was reset to f31241ad6cb6474e559289f1bd7110ea5d5a4fba * git://git.apache.org/maven-resolver.git was reset to b74f7a1e8837875b4780199f644119f55d22465d If you have clones of any of these repositories you will need to update them as the master branch has been force-pushed. As there have already been issues closed as fixed in 3.4.0 and a number of 3.4.0-SNAPSHOT releases were distributed for user feedback, it has been decided to burn the 3.4.0 version number as a signal of the reset. The next release of Maven will thus be 3.5.0 We have a (mostly) agreed plan for the content of the 3.5.0 release [2] (there are still some issues being decided on) As all the content of 3.5.0 has already been developed on the old master branches (which have been retained as the pre-reset-master branches) it should be relatively easy to pull each of the agreed changes and merge them. For this reason we hope to be able to cut a release candidate of 3.5.0 relatively quickly. The next step will be agreeing the content of next release (which we hope to have follow 3.5.0 after 6-8 weeks and will either be called 3.5.1 or 3.6.0 depending on the agreed content). The drive is to get almost all the content that was in the pre-reset-master released, but in a version history that makes it easier for users to understand the impact and makes it easier for developers to identify the potential impact of the changes. - Stephen (On behalf of the Apache Maven Project) [1]: https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/maven-dev/201701.mbox/%3CCA%2BnPnMx-e7kGYy3Hp87v8hLGdhp1q%3DtKLx_6QuZ4kGUqHEBGcw%40mail.gmail.com%3E [2]: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAVEN/Roadmap+2017