OK. So, apologies for hashing/re-hashing the subject... And yes, I'm negligent of not paying close attention to the various discussions. But that doesn't mean we can't be discussing now... If a 0.3.0 cannot be generated, then so be it... Just help us understand why...
Changing to use OSGi semantic versioning was complex and the subject of much discussion on the list. I did most of Maven work to make it happen so I'm probably best placed to explain, but even so it's complex. If you want to understand the rationale Alasdair gave a set of links to earlier discussions, however a better place to start (where we started in fact) was to read the OSGi alliance white paper www.*osgi*.org/wiki/uploads/Links/*SemanticVersioning*.pdf. There is an important paragraph towards the end where bundle versions are discussed.
Each bundle is now released separately as it must be if each bundle is to be versioned separately. In the past we used a release by module scheme but the maven release plugin will not handle having independently versioned submodules - so we had to abandon this way of working.
At release time the version of each bundle is determined by comparing it (in particular changes to packages) with the last released version. So - a bundle being developed at say, 0.3.1-SNAPSHOT might well get released at 0.3.1 or 0.4.0 depending on what had changed since the last release. This is all documented on the web pages http://aries.apache.org/development/versionpolicy.html.
There are aspects of the scheme that we implemented that none of us like, we spent a long time trying to improve on it. But, in the end we are an OSGi project and implementing OSGi properly was more important to us than a simple release scheme.
If you want to find some way to release from 0.3 and honour the OSGi versioning policy that we implemented ... it might be possible. I can't think how and given that it took (iirc) between 4 and 6 weeks of my time to switch us to semantic versioning I think you would be better to take code from trunk because I think it will take less time.
Zoe
--kevan
