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Maven Version Manager

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25 pointschii6 comments

This really shouldn't ever be necessary. Almost all of maven's functionality is plugin-based, and if you want reproducible builds then you should be setting the version of e.g. the compiler plugin in your porm. The differences between versions of maven-the-core are tiny, releases are relatively rare and consist almost entirely of bugfixes. It would be an exceedingly rare circumstance where you would want to continue using an old version when a new one is out.

I think it's unnecessary because the version of maven used is just one of many things that should be handled by configuration management. I don't think we need to have a separate tool to do this for every app out there. In my case, I'm using chef, so it comes from these attributes: https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/maven/blob/master/attri...

Also, maven-enforcer-plugin can lock a minimum version of maven. And Java for that matter.

> exceedingly rare circumstance where you would want to continue using an old version when a new one is out.

rare when you have only a few projects. Happens quite often when dealing with "legacy" code bases that are only receiving bugfixes. Maven, between 2.1.0 and 3 has changed a bunch of ways dependencies are resolved (especially transitive). Plugin defaults are also changed (but as you said, this ought to be solved with a base pom).

But the main usecase is when you want to have different versions of maven installed, but don't want to manually switch between them (which entails editing env variables, restarting the shell etc). Annoying and unecessarily boring work.

Why isn't there a mvn install X syntactic sugar like npm / gem / pip etc? There could be "mvnx" repository where first come first save simple names replace "groupId-artifactId-version" e.g. commons-lang will mean org.apache.commons.lang3 latest version...

Is there anything that does that?

there is also https://github.com/themnd/mvnenv

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