I posted a short blog on the subject [http://tinyurl.com/c7m8qv], and in
addition to that - I argue that LATEST and RELEASE are bad. What do you
think?
Extract:
--------------------
Let me first be clear about virtual versions as a whole: they are an
excellent source of hard-to-find build errors and should not be treated
lightly.
While SNAPSHOT is a necessary evil and somewhat eases developer's life,
RELEASE and LATEST are pure hell and should be deprecated right away.
All 3 grew from the lack of version manipulation tools, and SNAPSHOT at
least allows some kind of control - it replaces a partial version and we
in general agree that for, say, a jar versioned 2.3-beta-3-SNAPSHOT, all
binaries with version starting with 2.3-beta-3-... share common APIs and
behavior.
Why in the world we assume that any released version of an artifact
adheres to the same APIs and behaves the same - remains a mistery to me!
This was RELEASE. When we touch LATEST - gloves are off - it can be
anything, including the latest SNAPSHOT. So unless we don't have
anything else to do - I'd deprecate them on the spot.
--------------------
Thanks,
Oleg
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