: Yes, it's good that lots of Solr people are also Lucene people. But I : don't think that makes it alright to ship Lucene nightlies or : snapshots.
Apache Lucene is a TLP, Apache Solr and Apache Lucene-Java are just individual products/sub-projects of that TLP. If the Apache Lucene PMC votes to release a particular bundle of source code as "Apache Solr 1.3" and that bundle includes source (or binary) code from the Lucene-Java subproject that hasn't already been released (via PMC vote) then it is by definition officially released Apache Lucene software. So in a nutshell: yes it is "alright for Solr to ship Lucene nightlies" -- because once the PMC votes on that Solr release, it doesn't matter where that Lucene-Java jar came from, it's officially released code. I'm told there is even precedence for the PMC of a TLP X to vote and officially release code from completley seperate TLP Y because Y had not had a release and X was ready to go. Where dependencies on "snapshots" in official releases causes problems is when those snapshots are from third parties and/or are not reproducable -- where the specific version of the dependencies is unknown and as a result the "dependee" can not be reproduced. We do not have that problem with any Apache codebase we have a dependency on. We know exactly which svn revision the dependencies come from, and since the SVN repository is public, anyone can recreate it. -Hoss