Both Donald and I seem to feel the answer to this is obvious but we
have diametrically opposed points of view so maybe its time for
discussion.
After endless discussion we answered a related question for our specs
with the following principal:
The artifactId will contain the version number of the spec
The version will only contain the geronimo version.
I'm happy with this decision for specs.
We include a lot of other projects in geronimo, such as activemq,
axis, cxf, jetty, tomcat, etc etc. These projects evolve over the
years and when they get to a fairly incompatible change level they
generally change the major version number, such as jetty 6 to jetty 7,
activemq 4 to activemq 5, etc etc.
1. Do we want to give our users a clue about which version of the
external project they are using? If so, it has to be in the maven id
for our plugin that, through dependencies, installs the external
project.
2. If so, how? We get groupId, artifactId, version. I don't see a
plausible way to use the groupId, leaving us with artifactId and
version.
2.a. If so, how much detail? E.g. do we want to tell users they are
getting some flavor of jetty 6 or do we want to tell them they are
getting jetty 6.1.14?
2.b should the version numbering relate to the external project
integration or to the geronimo version it fits with?
My answers to these questions:
(1) definitely YES. We may want to offer support for more than one
level of the external project, and I don't think concealing major
changes in an external code base is a good idea.
(2)
- Putting the first digit of the external version in the artifact Id
clearly indicates the general level of external project support while
allowing easy upgrades to later external versions within that major
version. These are likely to be fairly compatible so may work find
with artifact-aliases support rather than recompiling. This also
clearly separates the geronimo portion of the version from the
external project version since the external project version is not
part of the maven version.
- Changing major version of an external project may well require
changes in code that uses the project. It's almost certain to require
repackaging of plugins that run against the project; e.g. the jetty
gbean wrappers changed dramatically from jetty 5 to 6 and are changing
again from 6 to 7.
- using the external project version would result in something like a
version of 5.2.2.2-SNAPSHOT for our current amq 5 integration.
However, there are some bugs so we'll need amq 5.3 or at least 5.2.1
before we release. So we'll need 5.3.2.2-SNAPSHOT even though our
integration code didn't change. I guess we could use 5.2.2-SNAPSHOT
although this seems very confusing compared to the amq version.
So I'm having a lot of trouble seeing how any scheme other than stuff
like activemq5 for the artifactId is remotely plausible.
Thoughts?
david jencks
