This discussion about respins is really strange to me. I've been cutting releases, with Maven, at Apache, for years now. And all of them have reused version numbers for respins. And all of them have carefully used staging technology (old: directories, new: Nexus) to ensure that artifacts don't escape to the wild until they pass the vote.
The reason for this is simple: it's burned into Maven that the version number is frozen when you run the release plugin. People complain about all this all the time; they have an expectation that they can have an 'RC' version number until that are absolutely, positively, sure the release is gold, and then change. But Maven won't do that. Further, projects don't like to 'burn' or skip version numbers just because of pre-release, internal, mishaps. Is this discussion, which I haven't followed carefully, I apologize, special to the main Maven package, as opposed to plugins that we just release with the release plugin? To me, anything labelled 'alpha' is _just a test version for the very brave_. I am particularly not impressed with an immutability argument for such. I suppose that the zen side is this: we would hope to do enough testing on alphas and betas that we could never possible need to respin a real release. And if people feel strongly enough that we need to never, ever, even come close to creating two things called '3.1.0' (e.g.), then we'll have to 'burn' 3.1.0 and skip to 3.1.1 if there's a respin. What _really_ appeals to me is the even-odd convention from the httpd: no 'alphas' or 'betas' -- odd numbers are 'at your own risk', even numbers are 'supported releases'. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
