Hi Arnout, On Tue, 2023-05-09 at 09:57 +0200, Arnout Engelen wrote: > Hi, > > Jackrabbit uses the fine mechanism of releasing unstable versions on > 'x.y' version lines where 'y' is odd, and stable releases where 'y' > is > even. > > This scheme is not super well-known in the Maven ecosystem, and I > think there's a risk of people being on unstable versions without > realizing it.
First of all I think it would be good to have a statement on what an 'unstable' release means. I scanned the downloads page [1] but I didn't find a definition: - are unstable versions less validated than stable ones? - are API breakages OK to be introduced in unstable versions? > > Of course that's ultimately on them, but I wonder if it wouldn't be > better to have only the stable releases on Maven Central, and have > the > unstable versions only on https://repository.apache.org - that way > people might somewhat more consciously 'opt in' to also seeing the > unstable releases? A simpler change might be to specific qualifiers ( reference at [2] ) and keep the current process, e.g. after version 1.52.0 the next unstable release would be 1.53.0-milestone-X, with the initial stable release being 1.53.0 . This would cut down on some of the confusion. At the same time, I think the odd/even versioning has some implications on OSGi bundle deployments, but I am not sure how important this is for Oak. In Sling we follow the same scheme, but we only release even version, odd versions are only snapshots. Thanks, Robert [1]: https://jackrabbit.apache.org/jcr/downloads.html [2]: https://maven.apache.org/pom.html#version-order-specification
