I apologize for the length of this email, I could not think of a shorter
way to present the issue/questions that is clear enough.
---
My environment involves the usual many open source dependencies (which I
control by specifying the versions to use in a master POM), but also a
large number of frequently changing internally built dependencies and a
huge number of applications that rely on these dependencies.
Changes on these internally built dependencies are carefully controlled
so that they are always backwards compatible. In over a decade before
we used maven we had a single instance of these dependencies and we
never - not once - had a version conflict problem.
But the default mode for Maven is to update the version number even for
a tiny change and then to manually update the version of the dependency
in every single project that depends on it. Since we have a lot of
those, this is a horribly error prone process leading to applications
that crash because they are using the wrong version of a dependency. As
an example... one of our crashing applications that was built yesterday
was found to contain a dependency JAR from January!!! when it should
have contained a JAR that was also built yesterday.
Things that we tried:
- Builds and executions *INSIDE* of IntelliJ work beautifully. It always
finds the latest code and it always runs on the local integrated server
perfectly. _The problem happens in the JARs/WARs of applications placed
into the Maven local repository_.
- In IntelliJ we tried checking
Settings/Build,Execution,Deployment/BuildTools/Maven/"Always update
snapshots" and not change the version number between releases so that it
would include a fresh copy of the dependency during build, but even
*completely wiping out* the local repository (the only one in use at
this moment) it still used the old cached version from January.
- Next I tried to use the <version>LATEST</version> syntax in the POM.
But LATEST was removed after Maven 2 and we are using Maven 4.
- Finally I tried to use <version>[0.0.1, 0.0.999)-SNAPSHOT</version> in
the hope of simply updating the version number of the dependency during
development/tests and only updating the formal dependency version to
1.0.0 at release time but Maven rejected the syntax. It is quite
possible that the syntax I used is incorrect, but sadly the
documentation is not very clear and provides no complete examples that I
could inspect or duplicate.
*QUESTIONS*:
1) Was one of the above methods supposed to work? If yes, what did I do
wrong and how do I fix it?
2) If none of the above methods is supported anymore (Maven 4), what
method should I be using?
3) Is there any other tool - besides Maven - that I should be using for
these builds.
- Dependencies - need help/advice: Getting the latest version... Bruno
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