Hi, It is already several years ago where we started discussing about Maven Next Generations. Clearly we needed to work on the pom, because over time we're facing more and more limitations. For (Maven) Central the Model 4.0.0 will be required pom format, there's no discussion about that. So we needed a new architecture where there's a local pom that is transformed to Model 4.0.0 or where it can be generated. With the implementation of MNG-6656 and the improvement with MNG-6957 we've made the first and important steps based on pom transformation. If this concept proofs itself, we can start thinking about enhancing the pom model.
When talking about Model 5.0.0 it looked like it would be great to introduce it for Maven 5. There was even a period where we thought about skipping Maven 4, just to sync the Model version with the Maven version. However, we discovered that this would be a huge change, and that we would probably need a couple of Maven 4 releases before moving to Maven 5. Maven 4 would consist of preparation releases. I've started writing the build/consumer to proof that the it is indeed possible to separate the local pom from the distributed pom, even though they both are currently still Model 4.0.0 compatible. The original idea was: Maven 3: build/consumer feature disabled by default Maven 4: build/consumer feature enabled by default Maven 5: Model 5 We were worried that this wouldn't give us enough feedback. maven-integration-testing shows that build/consumer does work. There should be enough trust to enable it by default, it shouldn't impact existing projects (the last find by Michael was actually great. It demonstrated the effect when using threads. The fix made sense and Maven was stable again). But it is simply not enough. We need much more feedback. Meanwhile other improvements have been done, that has impact: - new behavior of reactor commandline arguments - upgrade of default versions of plugins per packaging type - requiring Java 8 - Maven wrapper - there's a PR waiting that will shift the logic of the ProjectBuilder/ModelBuilder. As this is quite important for more people to understand, I'll record a Q&A with Maarten+Martin soon and share it with you. There are probably more, but all these already defend my opinion about the next Maven version. To me it is not a Maven 3 anymore, we're reached a point where we should start calling it Maven 4. The next release should probably have an alpha suffix, just to give users the chance to do alpha testing. WDYT? Robert
